May 18, 2008 - Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds - Watsonville, CA
Entered in the "150 Novice" class - use of rein is allowed.
Gabilan Cutters
 Again, I was the last rider in the draw for our class, so all these re-worked cows were pretty wise to us. |
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 Our first cow was probably the slowest of the bunch. I think he was blind or pretended not to see us. |
 This cow spent all his time watching the turnback riders. |
 The cow turned into us a couple of times as we were trying to hold our line, and once or twice even ran into my horse. |
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 We spent over a minute on this one cow while he just walked in circles or stood still looking like he was going to do something. |
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 We finished up nicely on this one and went back for another one. |
 Unfortunately, as soon as I had this one pushed out, he beelined right in front of us and went to the back fence where he turned .... |
 and then sprinted to the other side of the herd where we lost him because the herd was in our way and I couldn't get Ruby turned around fast enough to push it away. |
 I was just starting to push out another bunch to cut when the buzzer went off, but we still went after the third cow. |
 I think we both relaxed a little bit since the go was over, and we played with this white cow after getting it separated from... |
 ...another sticky black cow. |
 Ruby's having some fun with this one. |
 I had some fun too! |
 We actually worked this one a few nice turns despite some 'traffic.' |
 The class was over, the announcer said our score was a 60. In the few seconds we had that second black cow out, we lost all our points. |
 I tagged Ruby off and got some back up steps and then walked out the gate. |
Out of 8 riders in our class, 5 got a 60 score today. The three that did place, got scores of 70, 63 and 62. I was pretty happy with Ruby's performance; everyone complained about bad cows being bad for beginner's confidence. |
