Roma Oakes: A new partnership starts on the right foot

This is my first ‘blog’ ever so here goes. My horse Retina is very lame and the vet says that she won’t return to a high level of dressage again so that is very sad. She will winter out and then we will decide what to do. However – the good news is that I have a new horse! He is called Patch Mills Bakers Bridge – Baker for short and is a 16hh 7year old bay gelding of undetermined breeding! He is Irish bred though. He hasn’t done much of anything – just a bit of show-jumping and was for sale as his owner wanted to event but he just wasn’t fast enough to avoid time penalties.

He was owned by a friend of my trainer so she knew that he could be a good dressage horse and when I first saw him I was very impressed with his activity behind. So he was vetted and passed with no issues at all –hurray and he came to the yard on Monday 23rd Nov.

Now – I know that it is not the best idea to immediately take a horse that hasn’t really done any dressage to a show just a few days after buying him and having ridden him only four times.........but we went to a local show (just round the corner) on the Sunday. I had a lesson on the Friday when we worked on slowing his trot and getting him to concentrate. I just entered a couple of preliminary classes and it was blowing a gale. The first test was outside and he was a bit spooky at some of the tapes blowing about. The second test, Prelim 14, was indoors with a scary roll door but he was more settled and we really had just one mishap when he tripped coming down from canter to trot – so literally ‘fell into trot’. We took him back to his stable and then drove round to collect my score sheets. I nearly fell down in a heap – he got 61.5% in the first test and 69.17% in the second – and 3rd place! Both judges thought he was a fab horse with great paces and one described him as a big horse with a big trot to control – so he must look a lot bigger than just 16hh when in the arena.

So now we will not do any shows until after Christmas and just work at home on developing our partnership but it was a great start and I hope that I’ll get some photos of him soon, he’s quite a cheeky chap but I think that he has a lot of talent. That’s all for now.