Horse Show: Part Two

Saturday, my friends were excited to delve into the horse show.

Unfortunately, my friend's mare was lame, so this presented a slight issue.  Another friend had been planning on entering some walk/trot classes on Love (the lame mare), so we decided that they could take the SFM for a spin instead.

SFM isn't necessarily a hard mare to ride, but it's much easier to ride her if you ride correctly.  When I ride, I have to constantly remind myself of what I am doing or the Mare will always humble me. 

The same friend also showed the SFF in several halter classes.  The filly is pretty easy to show halter, although, not really enthused about the process.

Mare ended up with a fifth in an Arabian halter class, I believe.  Filly had I am not sure...fifth maybe? in the sporthorse-in-hand class at the show, which was a little entertaining given some of the horses that entered.  But that's an open show for you.  Sometimes you never know what will happen.

This show day also had the world's slowest judge.  Seriously slow.  At four pm, he was still judging halter classes.  How is that even possible?

The gal that's been riding the filly for me had a wedding reception to attend that evening.  Theoretically, not a problem since walk/trot classes are usually held right after halter and halter is usually done in the noon to one pm range.

Egads.

So the friend who had the mare that came up sore volunteered to ride the filly.  One little filly, one person who had approximately ten minutes to figure out how to ride this horse in her first undersaddle class.  That's a lot of guts right there, I think.  It went fine.  No ribbons for either mare or filly that first day undersaddle, but I was not especially impressed with that judge, but that's how it rolls sometimes...

The mare did end up with a third in "most classic head".  As previously mentioned, it's basically an Arabian vanity class.  Cooler goes on horse, so you can just see the horse's head.  Prettiest head wins.  ;)

Part of the crazy part is how long the show was taking.  Some people just packed up and left before the riding classes.  The ring announcer was getting tired and decided to be one of them, leaving my friend (the show manager) to announce.  Unfortunately, she also had horses being shown by farm clients, kids, and so forth. 

So my amazing group of friends and I jumped in.  We had our own horses to prepare and handle, but somehow, we got all the necessary horses saddled, people put onboard, horses in the ring, other horses put in the proper people's hands, and everyone basically ended up where they needed to be.

I'm still not quite sure how all of it worked out, but it did.   To those interested, classes ended at 11 pm on Saturday evening!  A long show day indeed!

Little did I know that it would be the calm before the storm on Sunday...