Open Pony Club Dengie Show Jumping – Area 10

I knew it would be a late night when I put my entry in for Amelia to Jump Destiny in the Open Pony Club Dengie Show Jumping at the Forest of Dean, Gloucester as it takes about an hour and a half to get there. When I entered I was told approx 6pm. The lorry has gone in for servicing so we decided to take Destiny on the trailor, although Destiny wasn’t too keen on this idea and it took us a good half hour to get her on. We arrived at 5.25 to find they were on class 5 and we were classes 8 and 9. Fortunately there wasn’t too many in the classes and at the Forest of  Dean they have a nice warm cafeteria area overlooking the arena but unfortunately they closed it at 6.30, we managed to get some food and a very weak cup of tea out of a machine that cost £1.30 and was disgusting before we had to leave and sit in the gallery. It is probably a couple of years since we’ve been there and I don’t know if they have done something to the surface but it was terrible. Every horse in class 6 slipped one even fell over. Amelia and I were concerned about the safety of  jumping and Amelia decided not to do the warm up class but Destiny needed to go in the arena before the open because she can be quite spooky so we decided that Amelia would take her in the warm up class have a quick ride around the arena jump one fence and retire. Which is what she did. I was also concerned about the course the double which is required to be 1.10m was 61/2 strides and several of the bigger horses had got very close to the second part, in previous classes also there had been some very random jump off’s, I really dont like to see a second round jump off starting with a double.  Any way we managed to get the double altered and the jump off wasn’t too bad but I was still very relieved that Amelia won the class with the only clear therefore did not have to do a jump off. This means that Amelia and Destiny qualify for the finals in Warwick on April 4th and we also have to be in Warwick for the finals of the Pony Club Quiz on the April 5th. Destiny decided she didn’t like the trailor any better going home either and it took us another 20mins to get her on, she travels on it absolutely fine though. So by the time we got back to the yard and fed all the other horses in was nearly midnight.

Posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 2:08 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.