b4breeding

Sorry about the lack of blogging – still coming up to speed from being unwell.

The Australian yearling sales have started, and here in New Zealand we have only a couple more weeks before the Australasian Classic at Karaka (22 February) and the Premier at Christchurch (23 and 24 February).

This is a pressure time for all preparers, but to be honest if the ground work hasn’t been done then it is too late to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. The canny buyers, usually trainers, will be focused on the underlying quality of the yearling, its conformation and pedigree, and what they see in their mind’s eye it will be like in another year or so. Those are not things you can turn around in the last two weeks.

Isa Lodge (the name Kym Kearns and I go under for our breeding) has two fillies and a colt headed to Karaka. All three have been raised at our home base, and it has been a pleasure to watch them develop. As always, Kym has done the hard yards of the preparation, and the horses reflect her skills and dedication. We are really pleased with them.

Lot 100 is a Shadow Play colt with heaps of character from my lovely mare The Blue Lotus. I love this colt. He is very sociable. He entertains himself with made up games, he’s intelligent and he can’t wait to have something more to do. He has a real zest for life, and my guess is that he’ll love racing. And that’s half the battle.

Lot 133 is a Rock N Roll Heaven filly from my top mare Zenterfold, so she is a half-sister to Tintin In America. This is the only filly from Zenterfold that has been offered at the yearling sales – she is genuinely for sale – and I think she’s a really nice racing proposition as well as having longer term broodmare value. She’s built like a brick sh**house, and has really quick reflexes. Very typical of the good Heaven fillies I’ve seen on the track, and potentially an early type.

Lot 115 is a Majestic Son filly from Kym’s mare Toggle. She’s an incredible yearling, lovely temperament, inquisitive, takes everything in stride. She’s a showy type in terms of looks, with a dark mane and a blonde tail. She seems a very professional youngster, well grounded, sensible. She’s got a really good trotting family behind her, and Majestic Son has given her a nice length and more height than her dam.

With the demise of the Harness Weekly, we’ve done almost no advertising this year – we feel many of the publications come out after the key buyers have long-listed and even inspected their preferred yearlings. We’ve focused more on having a good product ready to be inspected, hands-on, when buyers and trainers wanted to see them. We were delighted that PGG Wrightson again allowed smaller breeders in the Cambridge area to be part of the “buyers bus tour” of the major preparers/vendors in the Waikato area, by adding the Cambridge Trotting Track as a tour stop for presentation and inspection.  Almost all the top trainers were on that “bus tour”, and our lots did us proud.

Below are the posters we have developed for the yearling sale day promotions.