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| 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.
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| 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.
I had thought the shafts needed to be level, but in fact you have some wiggle room with them to point slightly up (but never slightly down), and the thing you need to look at for balance is the driver's seat. My seat was still tilted slightly forward at 1 hole up, which meant more pressure was on the shafts and therefore on the saddle/Disco's back. At two holes up, it was easier for me to sit, and easier for Disco to pull the cart.
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| We feel a lot more confident trotting with this cart than the other one! |
The other major adjustment I needed to make was the shaft width.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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