Month: November 2023

It’s been a while since I’ve done a review, especially one of a bridle. But man… I love bridles. A statement proven by the fact that I have *mumbles an incoherent number* of them hanging in the tack room. The correct number of bridles is always One More.

And I’m particularly excited to show y’all this one, because it’s a 1) a newer, boutique brand 2) a small business 3) woman-owned 4) the owner is awesome. Extra special bonus that the bridle is actually stunning and at a reasonable price point.

The brand is called Black Diamond Designs (website and facebook), based in Chester County, PA. The owner, Amy, is an equestrian herself, and has been making her own specialized and custom tack as well as sidesaddle habits for quite a while. She is an avid sidesaddle rider, foxhunter, and horse show participant. Having seen Amy develop her business over the years, I know that she’s put a lot of thought, energy, and effort into getting everything just right, and her first big line of bridles is no exception. She is a stickler for details, and it shows.

As you can see, I’ve got the hunter bridle, specifically the Wide Noseband Show Hunter Bridle. It’s raised and fancy stitched, with padding on the noseband and browband. It’s also got a really lovely wide monocrown that’s well-padded for the horse’s comfort. Mine is in the new darker “havana” color, so it comes as a rich chocolate brown. These bridles are made of Sedgewick leather, which is very sturdy, hardy, and long-lasting. It takes a little longer to break in than French leather, but it’ll last forever.

The noseband is 1 1/4″ inches, which I think is flattering to the vast majority of heads. As a bit of a bridle snob, one of the first things I do when getting a new bridle is inspect the stitching… is it tight, even, and straight? That can tell you a lot about the quality of the manufacturing process, and there wasn’t a flaw to be found in the stitching of the Black Diamond Designs bridle.

And the fit on Argo – chef’s kiss. Perfection. As someone who also makes custom tack, Amy is always very focused on getting the best possible fit. You can tell, because she’s really nailed the measurements on this bridle. It always drives me nuts when the cheekpieces or the noseband are wildly out of proportion with the rest of the bridle (ahem… France…) but there’s definitely no such problem with this one.

You can opt to get the bridle with matching reins, too… these are laced like a traditional hunter rein but have rubber lining on the inside for extra grip, which is brilliant. She said those are her most popular, best-selling item, and I can see why!

The price point is really impressive to me for a bridle of this quality, at only $150 for the bridle alone or $235 for the bridle and the matching reins. There aren’t many well-made bridles available in that price range anymore!

Amy also works one-on-one with her customers to ensure that they end up with the right design and size, and has tons of measurements available – you don’t get customer service like that very often!

In addition to the wide noseband hunter bridle she also has flat hunt bridles (man I love that classic look) and one with a really cool diamond-shaped noseband, for those that are looking for something a little different.

Basically – if you’re in the market for a nice new bridle in a reasonable price range and want to feel good about the business you’re supporting, definitely take a look at what Black Diamond Designs has to offer! Two big thumbs up.

Argo has officially been here a week, and we’ve already ticked a few boxes. First and foremost, he got scoped for ulcers.

IMO ulcer treatment is one of those “to be expected” things when getting a horse off the track, and in the old days I probably would have just thrown some Ulcergard at it and not bothered with a scope. However, over the years I’ve learned that not all ulcers are created equal. The size, location, and severity all matter, and all of those factors can change the treatment, the duration, and the required medications. It’s worth taking a look to see what you’re actually dealing with rather than just guessing, throwing money at something, and not having it work.

So, after fasting overnight (I felt so bad, poor guy thought he was starving to death) we went spelunking. And really, we found very little of note. For a horse fresh off the track, his stomach looks quite good actually. A few small grade ones, but nothing glandular, his pylorus looked lovely, and his gastric emptying was good. The vet recommended half a tube of Ulcergard for a couple weeks, which was convenient because I happen to have recently re-upped my Ulcergard supply so I didn’t have to buy any other meds. I just knew that since I had Ulcergard already he’d have something pyloric and require Sucralfate/Miso that would cost me $$$ but thank goodness he didn’t. Way to cooperate, Argo! Just a few little grade one’s definitely feels like a win.

Presto has continued to look sound in his boot, no sign of abscess brewing. I’ve hacked him a few times because he’s getting hella bored (which is real bad for his general aura) and he’s graduated to paddock turnout. We’re gonna see today if he hoof-tests good enough to put a shoe back on that foot and start resuming more normal activities. I hope so, he’s becoming a major pest. Ok, even more of a major pest than normal. He’s also gained an absurd amount of weight in the past couple weeks. Like… he blew up. There are fat pads above his tail and very little definition in his flanks. I even cut his food in half! Gonna be super getting him back into shape (to be specific, a shape that is not a sphere).

It seems very on-brand for him if he managed to time this lameness juuuuuust perfectly to miss precisely all of the fall recognized shows, the last two of which are the next two weekends. Like, honestly, well done Presto. It’s like he has a calendar.

Argo also did a little ground work last week, moving his feet and working on voice commands, respecting my space, lunging both directions, etc. He says going to the right is confusing AF. He’s exceptional at standing still though. 10/10.

After a couple days of groundwork I decided it was time to get on. He’s a quick study and I didn’t want him getting bored, and he seemed like he wanted something to do. I don’t think he’s done much since his last official work on 10/9.

Bless him though, I just climbed aboard and went out to the field. He’s not the type that needs to move his feet first or wind down or take much time to settle in, so… why not. I tacked him up, went to the mounting block, swung aboard, and away we went.

He was a little confused at first about this weirdest AF track he’s ever seen “like… where do we run tho?” but he was really really super for his first ride. His head was on a swivel, looking around at everything, but not in a spooky way. He’s just curious and taking it in. I had to kick him a bit to get him going, and it became apparent pretty quickly that one of our first tasks would be working on steering from the seat and leg. Which… in true Argo form, he started to get it pretty quickly.

We trotted both ways for a while, made lots of circles, stopped and stood and watched his friends, and that was it. First ride in the books! He is a more whoa than go kind of guy, so we’re gonna work on the go button a little bit, but I was quite happy with how smart he is and how quickly he understood things. I think he’s gonna be a good one!

Right now he’s wearing one of Presto’s old Halter Ego bridles – that fits him great – and Henry’s old dressage bit. He’s sort of in between the fits of Henry and Presto’s saddles… the Arion fits him great in the shoulder and width but bridges slightly. The Devoucoux panel shape is better but it’s too tight in the tree. Luckily between Hillary and I we have about 900 million pad options, and her Winderen half pad with middle shims to fill in the bridging area seems to be the key to making the Arion work. He fits in the same girth as Henry and Presto and is wearing my Lady Godiva breastplate, so… right now, no new tack required.

However, I did acquire some new tack. To be fair, it was so cheap it was like theft.

One of the local non-profits was having a big fundraising sale at a feed store down the road on Saturday. From the pics it didn’t look like there was anything promising, but… ya know… worth the 10 minute drive to check it out. And man, after some digging it felt like winning the lottery! For a grand total of $18 I got:

• a brand new Adidas lightweight jacket
• A Success Equestrian jump pad which looks like it’s been used maybe a few times MAX (those things are $140 alone)
• a Nunn Finer bridge breastplate
• two pairs of the nice gummy pull-on bell boots
• two books
• a cool mane comb/clip combo
• a mane razor
• a Christmas bonnet for Henry to wear at the POP show next month

I have never been so psyched about deals. Mega-score!

Today we’ve got our farrier appointment to get Argo some new Nike’s (no more racing plates) and fingers crossed Presto’s foot is healed enough to put a shoe back on so he doesn’t tear this farm apart from rage-boredom. Then Argo will get some bodywork as we work our way down the list of aftercare stuff to get him settled into his new sporthorse life!

First order of business, our intrepid orange hero has gotten a barn name – Argo. We’ll talk about how I arrived at that here in a minute. First, we gotta start at the beginning. I gave y’all a very short TLDR one-paragraph version of Argo’s life story in his intro post the other day, but like… I’m a wordy bitch, and he has a cool story, so buckle up.

Argo was bred in California by Ray McCanna, who also owned his mother, Devilinabaydress. Ray actually just died a few weeks ago, unfortunately, and that was who owned him through last year. Ray’s brother, Tim, was also Argo’s trainer up until last summer. I looked for Tim on social media but couldn’t find him so (being a creeper researcher) I decided to try looking for a phone number next. Initial searches gave me a contact pretty quickly, but it was a landline. After considerably more digging, a Washington State racing directory pdf from a few years ago had a different number listed, and that one was a cell. Bingo.

I sent a text, hoping it was a good number, and about 10mins later my phone rang – it was Tim! He was a super nice guy and said he was really happy to hear that Shadrack had landed in a good home. Tim said he’d been a great horse for his family and everyone had loved him, he was sweet and easy, a great mover with a big gallop, “a great loper for the guys in the morning”, he always tried hard, and was very sound.

Tim also told me the origin story of the name Shadrack. A good friend of Ray’s was a WW2 veteran and worked for the CIA during that time. Tim didn’t remember the man’s full name, only that his first name was Guy, but his code name in the CIA was Shadrack. Ironically, Guy just died about a month ago at the age of 99, two days after Ray.

I tried Guy as a barn name for him but it just didn’t fit, so instead I fell down a major CIA-themed rabbit hole. After combing through a bunch of documents on the CIA website, I finally hit on a list of the most well-known CIA missions, and Argo was one of them. The original Argo was from Greek Mythology, it was a ship built by the gods. That name definitely clicked with him, and I like the meaning behind it, so there we go! Still gets a bit of a nod to the source of his registered name via the CIA connection.

Ray also owned Argo’s dam, Devilinabaydress, during her racing career. He bought her as a yearling for a measly 6k… not bad for a Tiznow filly, but she wasn’t a good racehorse. Argo also has a full sister, although she wasn’t much of a runner either. His dam produced one other really good racehorse besides him, a mare named Hal’s Buddy that raced a whopping 78 times before she retired at the age of 9. Tim said she’s now a broodmare in Northern California.

Last summer Argo was claimed for a 40k tag in a race at Del Mar by George Sharp, who is the man that I bought him from. While racing for George, Argo finished 3rd in a Stakes race and second in an allowance. His final race was a 50k claimer in July, where unfortunately he bled a bit and finished last. Since then he just hasn’t been running quite the same, and after his last work on October 9th, they felt that the only options were to either retire him or drop him down to cheaper claimers. I appreciate that the owner didn’t want to do go with the latter. Although I haven’t spoken to him myself (the sale was handled by the trainer’s wife) yet, I was told that George is excited to potentially have one of his racehorses at RRP next year!

Overall Argo ran 32 times in a 5 year period and earned over 200k. He raced on all surfaces – dirt, turf, and synthetic – and in four different states: California, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kentucky. He accrued 6 wins, 7 seconds, and 1 third, meaning he hit the board in almost half of his starts. His racing style was very much that of a closer… he was usually one of the last horses going into the first turn, and then made a big rally through the final turn. I’ve watched almost all of his races by now, he has some serious speed when he turns on the afterburners.

What’s been really cool about reaching out to these people and hearing his story is that you can really tell this horse was cared for and loved and appreciated. That’s always really nice to see. He tried hard for his people and he lasted a long time, which I think says good things about both him and them. Plus I know so much of his history now. Tim said next time he was at his brother’s house he would find some old pictures and stuff for me.

Shadrack’s mare family is 1-n, which sporthorse-wise has been pretty successful… it’s the same mare family as 5* event horses Liberty and Glory, Bogue Sound, and Superstition. For racehorses, 1-n is home to Genuine Risk, Smoke Glacken, Forty Niner, Americain, and Alphabet Soup.. His direct mare line (going back 5 generations) has produced a 3* horse and a 1.35m jumper.

I also reached out to the farm that stands his sire, Gig Harbor. Apparently he’s quite studdish, and the vast majority of his colts end up gelded (which apparently “solves the problem”). Gig Harbor definitely has not been a super popular sire and doesn’t have a ton of offspring, so I haven’t come across any others yet. But considering his stud fee was $2k the year Argo was created, you gotta admit he gave them a pretty good return on investment.

To me Argo has a very “old school” type of TB look to him, he’s the type of TB I remember from when I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s. The only line breeding in the first 6 generations of his pedigree is two occurrences of Relaunch and two occurrences of Lyphard. He’s 16.3 and of medium build – not heavy, not light – with longer proportions and an ever so slightly convex face profile.

I might be biased, but I think he’s a pretty cool horse! Very grateful to his connections for trusting me with him as he enters his next career.

I accidentally did a thing. To be fair, I was deeply enabled (and it was joyous).

I’ve been saying for years now that someday I’d really like to find a project OTTB to do the RRP Makeover with. I think RRP is such a cool idea, looks super fun, and has been a really positive thing for OTTBs in general. I’ve bought their merch, I’ve sponsored an award with them, and I vote every year. Big fan.

Hillary got her new OTTB mare several weeks ago, not solely with RRP in mind, but that’s part of her plan. A couple other friends of mine have gotten OTTBs in the past couple months too, and are likely going to aim for RRP. It seems like 2024 is going to be the year of the ex-racehorse in my friend group, and I found myself like “dang, I wish I had something too, it would be even more fun to do RRP with friends.”.

But, ya know, I can give you about a thousand reasons why logic says that another horse is a bad idea. And then Presto hurt himself, earning himself a vacation and dashing all of our plans for the rest of the season. Before I knew just how badly (or not) he might have hurt himself, I did a rapid spiral and was like “would an OTTB really be that bad of an idea though?”. I have a very strong You Only Live Once mentality… none of us are guaranteed anything ever, and seizing opportunities as they arise has really been my modus operandi over the past several years. It’s led me on some pretty cool adventures, has it not?

I talked about the idea with some friends, who were super supportive, and scrolled casually through the OTTB facebook groups. I didn’t really see me being able to find anything promising for what I could afford (which was really pretty much the Henry price range)… thanks to things like RRP, Thoroughbreds aren’t as cheap as they used to be. Which I think is a really fantastic thing, but it does put the overwhelming majority of them out of my budget. I have other horses and their care to consider, as well as all the care a new OTTB needs, so I had to be pretty strict with the dollar amount I could throw towards a purchase price.

My sad lil budget was my sad lil budget, and it included shipping, so whatever I found had to be both cheap and close. Or free and less close. What were the odds? Slim to none, right? I was like well it’s very unlikely I’ll find anything I like (because we all know I’m also picky) that’s this cheap, so with all the audacity of a mediocre white man, I posted an ISO in one of the OTTB groups.

Here’s the viewpoint I had on the whole thing: if it was meant to be, the right horse would find me and things would work out. Leaving it up to Fate and all that. Which, I dunno, maybe that’s a cop-out, but I do a whole lot of things like that and it’s worked alright so far. I didn’t think it was likely that I’d find one I liked that I could afford, at all, but I threw it out to the universe anyway because you never know.

Most of the horses that I’d come across on my own that I liked were out of budget and/or far away and/or had major problems that I couldn’t live with. To be expected. But after I posted the ISO, the very first response was this:

Hmmmm. Tell me moooore.

Here’s my thing… what I was looking for with this OTTB wasn’t necessarily what I’d be looking for if I was shopping for a horse to keep and event long term to the upper levels. My priorities were a good brain, and I was really looking for the kind of horse that would be a fulfilling re-train. An older war horse, or a solid steady horse that had just never been much of a runner, something like that. Maybe not the most athletic or beautiful animal, but just a good egg kind of horse, if that makes sense. No offense to Presto but i am all full up on orangutans at my own personal zoo at the moment.

This chestnut, Shadrack, sounded like he fit the bill. He’d raced 32 times, earning over 200k, and had won on different surfaces. He’d even hit the board in a stakes race once, and over his 5 years in racing, he seemed like he was a tryer. For most of his career he’d been owned by his breeder and trained by his breeder’s brother and raced primarily in California. He was claimed for 40k last summer by another guy at a race at Del Mar, and then was brought east to Oklahoma and then Kentucky. The woman who had sent him to me was the wife of his current trainer, and she also rides sporthorses, so we got to chatting a bit and I told her a lot about me. She ended up offering him to me for 30% less than his listed price, which put him extremely near Henry’s cost, and within my budget.

The only problem is that he was still in Kentucky, 750 miles away. Dunno if y’all have looked at the prices for shipping horses lately, but it’s not cheap. Diesel is bananas. Shipping basically doubled his price, and that part put him out of my budget. Big sads. He looked and sounded like a sweet boy though, so I sent him to a couple friends, figuring ya know… maybe he’d be good for someone else?

One of my friends was like… I’d really like to be a part of this, so what if some of us from the Patreon group crowdfunded some money towards his shipping, and then he could be kind of like a Patreon group RRP-journey we can all go on together? A ShadrackShippingSyndicate if you will. I was floored that she would even offer to do that, and even more floored that when she suggested it in our Patreon Facebook group, so many people were eager to pitch in. People thought it would be fun to feel like they were part of the journey, and that’s just really freaking cool. My friends are bomb.

Things happened pretty fast after that. Shadrack himself was secured via Venmo on Friday, and pre-dawn on Monday he got on to a trailer and made the trip to Ocala, getting here that night. And well… he’s a stunner. Just a mega classy horse, and way better than I was expecting from the pics and video. How often does that happen?

Anyway – he’s got a really cool story (I’ll tell that in a separate post) and had a fun first day yesterday, and has a scope scheduled for tomorrow to check out his stomach and a farrier visit scheduled on Monday to start getting those feet addressed. Lots happening. Lots to share. Since the Patreon group was so instrumental in making this little adventure happen, all the goodgood behind the scenes stuff, video, and weekly training updates will get posted there. Hillary and I are gonna do kind of a whole “Road to RRP” series thing with both of our horses so hopefully it should be interesting and fun. Obviously I will still share him here too, just not in as much detail or as frequently.

I have no idea if Shadrack will want to event or not – we’ll see. I’ll let him decide what he wants to do, and hopefully we can get on the road to RRP 2024 so we can have an RRParty with all our friends!