Cob Jockey

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.

On Wednesday night, Mary came down. Our plan, which we had been building Disco toward for two weeks, was to lunge him over a raised pole with me on his back to get him to (finally) canter under saddle.

"Keep an eye on the weather, there's a very slight chance of severe weather tonight," I told her as she left.

I'm a trained storm spotter with the National Weather Service - the kind of person who reads paragraphs of Forecast Discussion notes from meteorologists twice a day when they update the forecast just for fun. Total weather nerd. So I knew the risk was minimal to low on Wednesday, and I was aware, but not concerned.

Mary and I lunged him without a rider first, then we discussed the game plan as I got on his back. "Okay, you're going to be cuing everything, I'm just holding the lunge line. As you approach the fence, get in two point, put your leg in the canter cue position and use your voice to ask him to canter. If he canters, great, let him keep going as long as he wants, but it probably won't be long. And bring him back to a trot before the next fence if he gets that far. We'll do it a few times on one side and a few times on the other."

With that, I walked him onto the circle. We got exactly half a circle into it when the sirens went off:

I know you can't hear a GIF, but just before I stop him, loud tornado sirens start, Mary asks what I want to do, and I jump off casually saying "Let me look at the radar."

I jumped off and checked the velocity radar scans on my phone. Unlike the usual reflectivity radar that shows precipitation, this type of radar scan shows you whether winds are moving toward or away from the radar site. If they're moving both toward and away from the radar in a specific spot, that's rotation, and it shows up as the confluence of green and red in one spot. If it's strong rotation, that spot lights up brighter and brighter.

During a tornado warning we had had the previous week, I rolled over in bed, checked the velocity radar, saw a weak area of rotation on the other side of the county, and went back to sleep. 

This time, I checked the velocity radar and saw a bright, clear tornado signature heading straight for the barn. "We need to go NOW," I told Mary.

The tornado signature is the confluence of the red and the brightest green color, just down and to the right from the little tornado icon.

We rushed poor Disco into his stall, stripped his tack, left it on the ground, left all the lights on and booked it back to my house to get in the cellar.

When we came out of the cellar a half hour later after the storm had just passed, I stepped onto the front porch and heard the unmistakable roar of a tornado to the east, moving away from us. Like low, continuous thunder that didn't stop.

Yeesh.

During the damage survey the next day, the NWS found that an EF-2 with max winds of 112mph had passed just two miles away from us and was on the ground for 13 continuous miles. No one was hurt, but unfortunately a couple of farm families lost entire (non-animal) barns and grain siloes. How easily that could have been us! 

Red dot is the barn

My night wasn't over, since the power was out, and uh, it didn't look like it would come back anytime soon.

There's a whole row of these things bent over like this one mile from the farm.

The farm is on a well, and it only has about an hour's worth of water in reserve before the pump needs electricity to pull more up. Since we have auto-waterers that only keep a very small amount in the stalls and then fill continuously to add more while a horse drinks, this essentially means we NEED backup power for any outage lasting longer than an hour. 

For that reason, the barn owners put a permanent generator in that runs off a house-sized propane tank that sits off in the woods you can see in the distance below.

It's the beige box in the front landscaping.

My BO has always insisted they've never needed that generator in 18 years, that because they buried all of the power lines to the farm when they built it, power rarely goes out for more than an hour, and he does have a solid backup plan to use the water wagon to trailer some over from his house across the ravine if everything really goes to hell.

But I'm neurotic about horses, water, and climate change, so I insisted on getting the generator running last year, which thanks to Leah's husband and my SO (who both, conveniently, work for a diesel engine company and both, specifically, have a lot of generator experience, just usually more on the datacenter scale than the farm scale), we did exactly that last year.

I was so grateful to hear the roar of that thing Wednesday night and to watch the well pump pressure gauge go up when it needed to.

I started getting targeted advertising for generators two hours after some frantic texts and phone calls to my boarder and my SO as I stumbled through my first time running a generator, because of course I did.

Thankfully, the power came back on after about four hours, so it ended up just being a good test for the generator and for me knowing how to use it. I am so grateful it wasn't worse.

A house near the farm I pass pretty regularly

(Side note: the warning was issued at 8:16pm, and the tornado didn't hit until 8:44pm, giving Mary and I plenty of time to take shelter. Also, the warning polygon shape ended up precisely covering the exact path the tornado ended up taking. All that is to say, the NWS is AWESOME and has made such incredible forecasting advancements in the last 20 years especially, and anyone that wants to defund them is an absolute moron that doesn't understand the good work these people do for honestly pretty low pay given how many lives they save every year. Ahem.)