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herecirm and I are in Australia at the moment. After a bit of tourist fun in the Sydney area and visiting the Blue Mountains, we have made our way a little further north. Back when I hosted Ross Jacobs teaching, he said if we ever wanted to stop by and visit with him and his wife Michelle, we would be welcome. He was probably quite confident that we wouldn't take him up on the offer, as they live some distance off the grid. However, it turns out that I can be surprisingly keen, especially when a chance to work with some horses comes along with the opportunity to go on an adventure with Sari.
We arrived at Ross and Michelle's comfortable off-grid property last night, after what felt like a long day of driving concluding in some pretty dark dirt roads.
This morning we got a start on working with the horses we will be playing with this week. Riley, who I will be working with, is a big chestnut thoroughbred who is quite resistant to moving forward. Sari is working with Birch, a chunky and slightly grumpy mare. Both horses belong to Ross and Michelle but haven't seen a lot of work over the last few months so there is plenty for us to work on.
This morning we started with some basic groundwork, giving us a chance to get to know one another. The main things I needed to work on were ( as ever ) getting more control of my energy and giving Riley more direction. Ross is particularly interested in giving the horse a place to go rather than asking them to move away from something and having used driving the horse as a big part of my way of working over the last few years so trying to do groundwork without that is a little like trying to knit with one hand behind my back right now but I need to be able to do it. A big thing that I noticed was that I needed to be paying attention to where we were going rather than looking at him. That made things way easier for Riley but commensurately harder for me.
Working with Birch, Sari was doing much the same work but with a different focus as Birch is a very different horse. Sari started out tending to wait too much for Birch who needed her to be more committed and insist that Birch keep up. Sari's background is quite different from this type of horsemanship and so this was her first time seriously working at it, it's challenging skill to learn and she was doing a great job of picking it up. What I noticed was how good things looked when they fell into place and how quickly she got a handle on things.
In the afternoon we rode, just getting an idea of where we and the horses were at. With Riley I was working to get him bending correctly- he was a bit stuck on the left rein. We also needed to work on moving forward smoothly- while he was dragging it was also marked by an uncertainty about how much he needed to hold back. Once he was able to just go forward he started to be able to relax and reach down, releasing the muscles in his back.
With Birch, Sari worked a lot on getting her to bend correctly in trot. Birch was tending to counterbend and Sari was learning to move her laterally using the rein, picking up an inside bend and asking the mare to stop dropping her shoulders in.
It was a good start to our visit and I will be very interested to see how we progress over the next few days. There are pictures to accompany this, but I don't want to eat too much of Ross' off-grid bandwidth so they will be posted later.
herecirm and I are in Australia at the moment. After a bit of tourist fun in the Sydney area and visiting the Blue Mountains, we have made our way a little further north. Back when I hosted Ross Jacobs teaching, he said if we ever wanted to stop by and visit with him and his wife Michelle, we would be welcome. He was probably quite confident that we wouldn't take him up on the offer, as they live some distance off the grid. However, it turns out that I can be surprisingly keen, especially when a chance to work with some horses comes along with the opportunity to go on an adventure with Sari. We arrived at Ross and Michelle's comfortable off-grid property last night, after what felt like a long day of driving concluding in some pretty dark dirt roads.
This morning we got a start on working with the horses we will be playing with this week. Riley, who I will be working with, is a big chestnut thoroughbred who is quite resistant to moving forward. Sari is working with Birch, a chunky and slightly grumpy mare. Both horses belong to Ross and Michelle but haven't seen a lot of work over the last few months so there is plenty for us to work on.
This morning we started with some basic groundwork, giving us a chance to get to know one another. The main things I needed to work on were ( as ever ) getting more control of my energy and giving Riley more direction. Ross is particularly interested in giving the horse a place to go rather than asking them to move away from something and having used driving the horse as a big part of my way of working over the last few years so trying to do groundwork without that is a little like trying to knit with one hand behind my back right now but I need to be able to do it. A big thing that I noticed was that I needed to be paying attention to where we were going rather than looking at him. That made things way easier for Riley but commensurately harder for me.
Working with Birch, Sari was doing much the same work but with a different focus as Birch is a very different horse. Sari started out tending to wait too much for Birch who needed her to be more committed and insist that Birch keep up. Sari's background is quite different from this type of horsemanship and so this was her first time seriously working at it, it's challenging skill to learn and she was doing a great job of picking it up. What I noticed was how good things looked when they fell into place and how quickly she got a handle on things.
In the afternoon we rode, just getting an idea of where we and the horses were at. With Riley I was working to get him bending correctly- he was a bit stuck on the left rein. We also needed to work on moving forward smoothly- while he was dragging it was also marked by an uncertainty about how much he needed to hold back. Once he was able to just go forward he started to be able to relax and reach down, releasing the muscles in his back.
With Birch, Sari worked a lot on getting her to bend correctly in trot. Birch was tending to counterbend and Sari was learning to move her laterally using the rein, picking up an inside bend and asking the mare to stop dropping her shoulders in.
It was a good start to our visit and I will be very interested to see how we progress over the next few days. There are pictures to accompany this, but I don't want to eat too much of Ross' off-grid bandwidth so they will be posted later.