This was a large event with around 300 entries.The weather for the weekend itself was great, but unfortunately the week leading up to the event had seen large down pours of rain, causing parts of the XC course to become waterlogged and unrideable in parts. This meant that the course had to be altered for all grades early on Saturday morning.
Fortunately, the dressage arenas and SJ arena had remained dry enough that we didnt slide around too much.
Im proud to say, that we achieved, our BEST open competition dressage result! Woo hoo!
We have been having a stack of lessons with a new coach and things are starting to become MUCH easier for both of us. This means that we had a very consistant dressage test! Scoring mainly 6's and 7's with an 8 for my long rein walk! We had no arguments during the test which is unusual for Paris- but very pleasing. We ended up placing 15th out of 30 with a score of 62%!!! Yay for Paris!
We then continued on to do a very smooth, clear SJ round!!
After showjumping we jumped up into 9th place sitting on our dressage score!
Sunday saw us 6th on course for XC. Paris was a little legend and cruised around with nothing a bother. We managed to get a semi normal entrance into the water, with minimal argument about getting her toes wet.
Unfortunately, I put the wrong XC time into my watch, which saw me come in 18 seconds faster than the minimum time (Which I thought was the optimum..) Therefore incurring 7.2 time penalties and dropping into 12th place. Very dissapointing on my behalf, as we are generally pretty good at going clear on our XC time, which would have seen me sitting around 5th place!!
But we live and learn dont we?
We have two more Introductory starts for this year, then we will up to Preliminary for the Canberra event in September. Im very optimistic!
