Dengie Dressage Area Final

Saturday saw the Area Final of the Pony Club Dengie Winter Dressage. 13 competitors had qualified and 12 entered. Several months ago I agreed to hold the area final as a venue had not been found. Before I went away in Feb I had two entries and up until the week before the event only a handful of entries and this does make arranging a judge difficult. I actually sat down with the book (and bottle of wine) and rang every List judge in Wales and couldn’t get one but I did find a Judge on the training list willing to do it in the end, Barry Kelvin-Hall. I am thinking they probably all had tickets for the Grand Slam. Which was another problem the M4 into Cardiff would be at a standstill for the match at 5pm and the Dressage started at 4.30pm. Anyway on the day I had to take Jen into Cardiff in the morning for photographs in evening wear, part of the Miss Wales launch of Dress.com I managed to get back to Talbot at 1.30 and then dashed to Instore to buy a couple of plastic Plant pots to stuff my plastic and silk flowers in, which I’d bought half price in Tescos. Buy this time it was raining quite hard. Grabbed some lunch and sorted out some judging sheets etc for the Dressage. At 3pm I taught the level 1 lesson who I must say have definitly improved since last week. Which left me 30mins to set up the arena for the dressage. Megan or Brooke helped me (can never remember which is which) Steve got the boards in and M or B helped me lay it all out and mearsure it and it looked very nice once the silk flowers were in place at the entrance. By this time it was now hammering down with rain. Barry was in place to start the warm up class, the first competitor was in the arena and I couldnt find the list of competitors. Amelia was writing for the judge and she knew who the first two were so they made a start whilst I rang through the torrential rain to the house to find them and photocopy them. As I was going back to the School the first competitor who had finished her test informed me that she thought I had put some of the letters in the wrong place. Nightmare, I raced back to the school only to find that the letters were in the right place and she had actually gone wrong. By this time our Area Rep Sandra Fisher had arrived, Its always nice to have people of a higher standing at these events it means from that point on I can use the term ‘Ask Sandra’ I did feel sorry for the kids having to warm up in such awful weather most were soaked right through. There was a lake to contend with around the indoor school and on the yard but the event itself seemed to go without problems, only one didn’t turn up and Victoria Tamplin from Llangeinor won the event with Sarah Williams fromDavid Davis 2nd. These two will now go to the final in Warwickshire. Throughout the competition I received updates on the rugby score from friends who were watching it in our local pub, everyone cheered when we announced Wales had one the Grand Slam. The problem with going to the pub later was everyone else had been in there since before 5pm and was blotto but the atmosphere was good.

Open evening and BBQ which I commented on a previous blog would be July 5th may actually be the 12th will let you know when I know for definite!!!!

Posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:42 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.