Silfra
Click here for the Winter 2007 update
Meet Silfra - our internet bride from Iceland via Holland - quite a long download time even over broadband but, once she was here, worth the wait.
Silfra came our way in March 2007 in one of those strange sets of circumstances - a friend of a friend of an acquiantance knew somebody who had heard of ......
Anyways - Silfra hitched a lift back from Holland with Smári who had been invited to take part in the Dutch IceTőlt competition and we met up with them at his place. She had been honestly described as itchy and overweight so we were not too surprised to find a chubby, maneless creature - in fact she and me made quite the matching pair
Fiona bit the bullet and took Silfra out for a quick spin around the Wiltshire countryside finding good tölt underneath the flubble. We loaded her up into The Malcolm and soon she was back in Deepest Devon where it was Fat Camp for a month or two.
Not being blessed with the riding attributes of the SWMBO (you should see her seat and thighs move in harmony - a sight to gladden any .... sorry - getting a bit off topic there) I was able to gets lots and lots and lots of trot from this little tölt machine so the mini-SWMBO got to take over the reins and I went back to flogging Billy No Mates Bob Marley around.
By a combination of restricting her grazing quite harshly and introducing her to the one thing that Holland usually lacks and we don't - hills - we shifted around eighty kilos off her over two to three months. As the fat started to turn into muscle we found that she was, in fact, a good horse - quite sensitive to the leg and voice, forward going and with really good tölt.
Mini-SWMBO and I did a bit of mini-hestakaup for the two Autumn shows at Oakfield Farm and I had a real scream on Silfra - the V1 Four Gaits went really well but the T1 Tölt was a bit formidable - Silfra, at that time, had a good, clear four beat tölt only at a slow/medium speed so, when a shortage of entries meant that we made it into the T1 Final I really wished that I'd brought along a 'convoi exceptionnel' sign as the fast tőlt section consisted entirely of us tootling alomg in our best 4mph, four beat tőlt as the other combinations flashed past in a dusty blur - all is well that ends well though and nobody rear ended us in the slow lane.
