Cob Jockey

I've gotta catch up - we've had some adventures lately!

Day parking: EMPTY!!! It's a Christmas miracle!

When I saw both Leah and I had the Friday before Easter off work and the forecast said sunny and 80, I knew that was our day. And for once, which never happens with horses, everything went exactly to plan.

This was my first off-property ride on Disco, and I really did enjoy it. The worst thing he did all day was call and gawk at other horses, but he came right back to me each time I asked him to focus. It was more young horse stuff than young stallion stuff.

The ride started out interesting in a couple of ways. We chose to do a very small amount of B, which is a trail that goes up steeply, then down steeply about 3/4ths of a mile later. 

When I asked Disco to go uphill from ride camp, he initially said no - not sure if he didn't want to leave other horses or if the hill was intimidating, but he got over it quickly, and that was his only sticky moment all day.

The most interesting part of the ride happened about 20 minutes later as we were coming down off B with the intent to cross ride camp and go to A. We were coming down off the steep grade straight into our first water crossing, a rocky creek, and as soon as Disco was in the middle of it, we heard a commotion through the underbrush at a campsite maybe 30 feet from us. A horse tied at the hitching post was bucking like a bronco because its saddle had rolled over and was totally underneath it.

Disco started to get excited, so I made a quick executive decision to walk him straight up the middle of the creek away from the horse until the owner got that situation resolved. Not that I'm surprised, but let it be known: water is no issue with this horse.

From there, we had a pretty chill rest of the day. Disco both led and followed Pyro, and we both passed and got passed by other horses. Getting passed was a bit sticky, but in a "this is a good training situation" way, not in a dangerous way.

In the end, we covered 4.5 miles in a leisurely hour and twenty minutes, which was plenty for Disco's current fitness level. It really does not take much to wear him out, and he needs to build the baseline walking fitness before anything else.

We tackled a lot of firsts for us both on this ride:

• First trail ride
• First time being tied to my trailer
• First time in ride camp with other horses around
• First water crossing
• First time being passed and passing strange horses on trail
• First time wearing Scoot Boots (he and Connor are the same size, BLESS)

He's also, as they say, "can broke" now since he didn't object to Leah cracking a cold one midway through. I stayed two hands on the reins and sober for this one just in case, but will be joining her in the future!

The only casualty? My trailer screen! I should have predicted this, but Disco has always particularly enjoyed shoving his nose between bars of all kinds (stall bars, trailer window bars, he's not picky) and he busted the screen out immediately. He's not getting it back either, since he'll just keep doing it, so it's flymasks for him on the trailer from here on out.

RIP the screen on the drop down window

All in all, I was super happy with this trip, and I'm looking forward to doing as much of it as I can this summer with him.

Last night was probably the last time Mary will get to see Disco for a good long while. She's moving a bit further away for her husband's job in the next month or so, and Disco is leaving for The National Drive and "S3x Camp" right after the drive. So, she put a proper ride on him for the first time ever (her only other time on him was cooling him out bareback).

PC most photos: Leah

Shenanigans and all.

It was great to see her on him and to get her assessment of him. She really enjoyed herself, and couldn't stop commenting on how much he enjoys new games, how thoroughly he thinks through problems, and how you can really feel his moment of understanding when he gets something "right". 

She's right, in all those respects, and it's such a very different ride from Connor. Connor is not a thinker, he's react-er. He learns more slowly and less deliberately than Disco does, and it takes things longer to be confirmed with Connor.

Of course, she also pushed his buttons in ways I haven't, and as a result, we had one small moment of disobedience, his first since he's been here.

This was not a spook, it was a very obvious attempt to see if he could get out of work a few minutes into the steering game. Mary sat it well, and just like when he tried to lawn dart the trainer in Canada, he seemed to go "Well, that didn't work so I guess I'll just get on with it," and never tried it again.

She didn't ride him to exhaustion at all, but it just doesn't take much to wear him out yet, and he was more than up for being ground tied for grooming afterward - didn't move one single foot.

Now that his ground tying is very solid, I've been leaving him ground tied for post-ride grooming as much as possible - both for the practice, and so that he can relax over his topline. "His" crossties are still set very short so that he can't grab them - although now that I type this, I realize he hasn't tried that in months, so we should probably lengthen them and see if we're past that stage. Babies!

I am really going to miss Mary living so close, both as a friend and especially as an exceptional horsewoman. She just thinks differently than I do, and all of us have benefited greatly from having her around these last 5 years.

As I totally didn't cover in my previous post, on canter night I started to suspect that Disco's saddle wasn't fitting well. His body language was tense and angry, and I felt a pressure point behind his shoulders, as well as a real asymmetry. As an in-the-moment fix, I shimmed it with a half-pad which made him feel just better enough to get us through.

Afterward, I grabbed the Wow saddle fitting gauge we have and discovered that he's gone DOWN two headplate sizes, with all other components staying the same. 

This makes some sense: I know he's grown 3.5cm in the last 6 months, that he has visually sprouted withers, and that I can't make jokes about him being shaped like a potato anymore. Still - I didn't expect him to go down, and I was grateful to have the gauge to confirm that for me.

Not happy.

I got the headplate swapped out and also reset my Flair panels to atmospheric air pressure before going through the slow, methodical reinflating process as best I could without a second set of hands to do it while I was in the saddle, which is best practice. 

And...

It was like I had a different horse. One I had never felt before.

WHO IS THIS HORSE.

At least on straight lines where he could more easily balance, he was forward, he was moving over his back, he was reaching for the bit. He was TAKING ME, finally, which we have been working on for so long.

I felt bad that he had been suffering with a poorly fitting saddle for at least a few months, but I felt vindicated that with Wow, fixing it was as easy as re-measuring him and then spending a half hour in the office swapping out parts. I really don't know how I'd do the young horse journey without it! 

Look at those ears! What a change.

I'm not glad it happened, but I'm grateful that it taught me some things about Disco that I needed to know: that his default response to "something isn't right" is to go #slugmode, and that (I had already been gathering data on this one) he is not at all stoic about pain, which I am so grateful for after Connor, who would rather suffer in silence than let me know something is wrong.

There's still more adjustment that needs done the next time I have a second set of hands, particularly for balance, but I already felt so much more secure and balanced in it even though it was dumping me out the back a bit, and it paid off during the ride: I was much more able to influence his body parts than I have been lately.

Shame Pivo cut off his head here, he was going so cute.

That's it - I officially am all-in on Wow. It is so much kinder to the horses to be able to make adjustments like these on the fly rather than waiting for a saddle fitter, or experimenting with different saddles forever. I'm going to be setting a recurring task on my to-do list to re-measure him every month from here on out so that I can stay on top of changes like this while he finishes growing.

Up until last night, I hadn't cantered Disco under saddle yet. I had asked a few times a couple months ago and only ever succeeded in getting a strong trot out of him. It was a strength, coordination and confidence thing. He had done it in Canada with the pro, but never with me, and hadn't cantered under saddle in over a year.

All photos by Leah

So I took it back and worked it on the lunge. Not a lot, and only on big circles, but enough to where I knew he was getting more comfortable with it in general, and to where the "canter" cue was confirmed.

It was actually so confirmed that by the time Mary and I reconvened for Round 2 of "Get Disco to Canter Under Saddle" (with Round 1 being interrupted by that EF-2 tornado a couple weeks ago), I told her we didn't need to use the baby jump to get him to canter, that I thought he understood the canter cue well enough to just pick it up.

So that's exactly what we did.

There was a moment at first where it felt to me like he was going to start playing and dolphin-ing and I tried to grab the reins to prevent him from putting his head down and broncing, but Mary brought us down and asked what I felt and explained that it had just been him trying to find his balance, and again reiterated where she wanted my hands. 

Otherwise, it was quite uneventful, and his canter is EXCITING. I got the sensation over and over that it was a canter I could take to the base of a jump, strong and powerful and full of impulsion, not just speed. It was so unlike Connor's canter - we spent years trying to get his canter where Disco's naturally already is.

It went so perfectly...and my immediate reaction was this deep, confirmed, peaceful thought that I really do need to send him off for training now.

Why?

Because even though it went perfectly, he was a good boy and I was very proud of how I was able to think through it and ride it without devolving into lizard brain, the canter in particular is going to be a hard gait for me to influence as long as it's in the wild-and-woolly baby stages. 

I could either spend the next year or two trying and probably mostly failing to improve it, or I could send him to a professional for a couple of months this summer and take him into this coming winter at a point in his training where I do have the tools and skillset and comfort level to make rapid progress with him. And after screwing Connor up and then having to pay later on to have him fixed, I know which one I'm picking this time.

But in the meantime, I'm basking in the glow of knowing that canter is in there, and dreaming of where it will take us someday...

The cart isn't adjusted well here yet, but would you look at that COLOR!

It's a really intimidating sport. There's a lot to remember, a lot that I don't know yet, and a lot that can go wrong if things go wrong. That, and just not feeling confident in the first cart, has kept me from driving (at least, with a cart behind him) since my last lesson. But that changed this week.

Photos mostly by Leah

With Leah's help, I got the Frey hitched to him for the first time, and started making the adjustments needed to balance it to him, both to the cart and to the harness.

The adjustment that helped the most was raising the tugs (the heavy leather loops the shafts sit in). In the top photo on this post, we hadn't yet raised them at all. In the photo below, on Sunday night, I had raised them one hole.

And in this photo from Monday night, I had raised them two, which is where I'm going to keep them unless a professional tells me otherwise.

We feel a lot more confident trotting with this cart than the other one!

The Frey shafts are adjustable in length and also adjustable in width (at the horse end only). When I first hitched him up to it, they were way too wide. I rotated them in some, but the tugs were still being pulled away from the horse as shown below:

This also puts extra pressure on the saddle and on Disco's back. Fun fact: the saddle of this harness IS treed even though it's only like four inches wide, so it does distribute pressure better than some types of harness saddles meant for other purposes. But you still don't want a lot of pressure on it anyway.

So the next night, I rotated the shafts basically all the way in. It's not an adjustment you can make quickly or easily with the horse standing there, so I just took a flyer on how much I needed to adjust them.

This was a lot closer to ideal, with the tugs hanging nicely down from the harness. I'm going to rotate them back out just slightly before our next drive to give his body a little more room between them, but I'm happy with it.

And in a year or two he'll do the Welsh Cob thing and grow OUT all of a sudden, and I'll have to rotate them back out, ha. Video from Tricia, my passenger. I absolutely cannot film and drive!

Finally - I'm working on becoming more independent with driving. It's a huge rule in driving that you never have an animal attached to a cart without someone holding their head, and you never break that rule in public, but pretty much every driver I know breaks that rule at home and just installs a good "WHOA, DAMMIT," because they never have a second person around to hold them while hitching up.

Silicone winter over ants are pretty ideal for sticking to the Frey seat. I think I'm going to be driving in full seats year-round.

Last night, I brought out his purple "work halter" (the halter and lead rope that we only use for ground work), put it over his driving bridle and went through our usual ground tying cue while I hitched and unhitched, with Leah a safe few feet away to grab him if he moved.

I needn't have worried. He didn't move a single foot.

Could not be less interested in moving right now, thanks.

Tricia said, "Are you SURE you have his birthday right? Are you sure he's the age you think he is?" It really is incredible - he's still 3! Just a few weeks away from being four. He's just that good.

All of that has given me the confidence to send in my entry for The National Drive here in a few weeks, but that's a topic for another post.