Hail-proof

Spring is coming to Oregon!  In the past week we've had a sun, rain, wind, and today we got hail.  It was sunny when I headed out to the barn, with some clouds and it had rained a little in the morning.  The footing in the outdoor was great, so I set a few fences for Buddy and I to work over. It's been a few weeks since we really jumped, so I put up just two single verticals.

He warmed up ok, but a little sticky in the canter transitions.  I didn't push it since I wanted him happy for our over fences works.  We started over a cavaletti trotting back and forth.  He felt good and seemed to wake up. I then went to the two verticals.  They were on the diagonals, and the left to right one was not working for us.  He kept drifting to the left, when he normally goes right.  We had a couple ugly fences till he figured out that he had to move off my left leg. 

We had only done maybe 6 jumps when it started raining, lightly at first then pretty hard.  I had a couple hard drops hit my face before I realized it was hailing.  We were headed to a jump when the sky opened up and hail the size of peas started coming down. We took the fence then high tailed it to the barn to wait in the barn aisle till it stopped.  Buddy really didn't seem to care about the hail, he only shook his head a couple times.  Even though we were only out in it for maybe a minute, we were both soaked.  Once the hail stopped we went back out, but the footing was soup so we called it a day.

You can see the hail in his mane.

The hail covered arena