Small Show For Brother

I didn't have anything better to do Saturday afternoon so J took me and Brother to a small show about 30 minutes from the house. 

You can see how Brother felt about the situation.  There were only 3 classes for us and one ended up being a pattern class of sorts. 

We started with Go As You Please Western in which he did awesome.  (finally got him clean enough to use our new trophy saddle pad we won last year)  But we only made it 1/2 way around the ring both directions and I'm not even sure the judge ever looked at us.  

But I guess he saw us in the line up and we got 2nd out of 6.  We then went in Open Western Pleasure where we almost made it all the way around using all three gates before reversing.  He did good here too getting 1st out of 3.  But something in the back corner spooked him and he remembered to be scared of it in the last class. 

I don't think I usually look like this when I ride,  but this is where he spooked and I was trying to get him to lope and stay on the rail.  The whole thing was a total disaster.  The pattern was all on the rail, jog, walk, lope, extended lope, stop, reverse and repeat.  When we got to the extended lope he extended but in the vertical direction.  He took off bucking down the entire length of the arena.

My hat blew off and when we came back around he made a beeline for it on the ground only to spook at it and take off bucking again.  (should have been wearing my helmet and I wouldn't have to worry about losing it)  I only got him stopped by about running him into the fence.  One of the spectators said I was the only one  in the class not holding onto the saddle horn. 

The other two horses in the class were just as terrible and we were called back for rail work.  Brother sort of settled down and was respectable and we managed to win the class.  The judge said he thought we wanted to do rail work and I said I thought since we were all so bad he just needed to break the tie.  The only thing to do after a performance like that is to laugh about it.  We won back $26 of the $30 entry fees so it was a fun, cheap evening.