My Ride on Starry D

I had the opportunity to take Starry for a ride with Ellen and Dante.  I didn’t know how he would do.  Would he be willing to take the lead?  Would he get stuck going backwards?  Would I survive his trot?

Starry has the worst trot--ever.  He has an incredible amount of bounce and it is somewhat irregular.  Of course, you have to post, but posting isn’t easy.  The faster he goes, the easier it is to post--the main reason we don’t want to follow pokey Dante.

When I mounted Starry, we were in the lead.  I asked him to walk a few steps and clicked him.  I did this a few times to accustom Starry to the sound of my click which is different from Kevin’s click.  He understood, but once Dante caught up with us, he refused to take the lead.  Dante had to go first.

Halfway down the hill, the trail gets a little wider and the far right end has a very small tree that you can go off the trail, go around it and go back on the trail.  This is a place where we can often trick Starry by stopping and hiding behind the tree.  Of course Starry can still see us, but sometimes he will still pass us and take the lead.

It worked, and we were in the lead.  Starry marched down the rest of the hill, into the river and to the trail on the other side.  This was an accomplishiment in itself.  There have been more than a few incidents where Starry gets halfway up the river bank, realizes he isn’t in the lead and stalls out or starts backing up.  It is too narrow to pass him, so that leaves Ellen stranded in the water until Kevin works it out.

Another place that Starry has problems at is just coming out the river to head down the trail.  When I reached that spot, I woudn’t let him pause.  Instead of waiting for Ellen, I kept him marching down the trail.  When I would feel him slowing, I squeezed my legs to keep him moving.  I did click him a few times for walking well.  When I saw that Ellen made it across the river, I started trotting.

Since Starry knew that Dante was back there, he didn’t want to trot fast, at all.  The slower he goes, the rougher his trot becomes--and I was having a hard time finding his rhythm.  I decided my best bet would be to only trot short distances, wait until Ellen gets closer and trot on ahead.  When I was walking, I woould intermittently click him for forward movement.  Starry and I were gettng along quite well.

This is how we handled things until we got to the next river crossing.  We decided to turn and head towards home.  Starry wouldn’t take the lead, but that was no surprise.  The turnaround point is one of his troublespots.  We let Dante go in the lead and started to trot.

I wouldn’t let Starry follow directly behind Dante--I had him offset to one side.  Dante trots much faster on the way home--particularly on that section of the trail.  Still, he wasn’t going at top speed.  Starry started inching up.  Before we knew it, we were right next to each other.  He had done this on the last ride with Kevin, so that was what I expected.  I squeezed my lega to ask for more speed.  We started gradually passing!  At a trot!  Shortly after taking the lead, we reached the spot that we planned to stop, so we did.  Starry was in the lead.  I asked him to walk--and he did!  He led all the way home.

We had decided to pass up home and go a little the other direction.  Before I reached the river bank that I planned to pass instead of go down, Starry figured us out and stalled.  I couldn’t get him to take a step forward.  We can’t figure out how he knew we weren’t going home.  Dante had to take the lead.  We passed up home.  I tried to get Starry in the lead, but it just wasn’t happening.  We ended up turning around and going home.  Starry was happy to lead across the river and up the hill to the barn.

He wasn’t perfect, but he did pretty good.  I just wish he was easier to trot, and we would have done a lot more of it.  It is always fun to ride another horse, and Starry is pretty awesome.