Alice and Jaffa’s trip to the Area Dengie Competition.
After qualifying for the Dengie Winter Dressage at Laughton Manor in December, I made what seemed a very long journey to Barleyfields Equestrian in Derbyshire to compete in the Area Finals on March 14th. There was me and of course Jaffa, my mum and Jaffa’s lovely owner Lizzie, who drove us in her lorry. I arrived quite refreshed as I slept most of the way ..And according to mum and Lizzie snored for most of the journey!
When we arrived it was howling a gale and the warm up arena was next to a field with some very skitty ponies..I was beginning to wonder what I was doing there!. We did eventually calm down and I entered the arena for my warm up class, Novice 20. Jaffa performed impeccably. He must have sensed my nervousness and made up for my silly mistakes. Circling at E instead of C..Duh! Anyway the results went up quite quickly and I was so surprised and honoured to have won the class. This gave me more confidence to go out there and show off. (Tracy has taught me well)!!
There were 37 in the Dengie qualifying class and we were in 3rd. I felt the test went really well…of course with dressage there is ALWAYS room for improvement, but I was happy. The scores again went up very quickly for the first 20 riders and I was lying in 3rd Place. Only the top 3 qualify for the National Pony Club Dengie championships. It really was nail biting stuff. Grace and Tracy were keeping in touch by text all the afternoon, I think they were getting as excited as us! We did think about taking Grace’s advice of coughing very loudly as all the opposition came down the centre line to put them off, but thought better of it as there were more of them than us!
The results seemed then to be going up very slowly. By the time 30 results had gone up I was still in 3rd place, but then right at the end the last 2 riders knocked me down to 5th place.
I was extremely pleased with our performance, as Jaffa and I have only been a partnership since October last year and are just coming together, but at the same time bitterly disappointed to have missed qualifying by 2 points!
Despite the disappointing end I really enjoyed the experience and will use it as a practise for the Area Dressage in July, hopefully with a qualification at the end of that.