Blue Water Equestrian

06/04/2026

This summer let's put the 'FUN' back in Fundamentals of Horsemanship.

I am on a mission to keep horsemanship alive for the next generations.
Understanding that there is a difference between riding to win and that the win is not just the ride. Winning is the care, the education, and the love from hard work has paid off. Building skills for a lifetime, not a moment.

What I am offering is a one on one condensed Horsemanship Camp, out of the saddle, in 60 minute time slots in Jupiter Farms and Caloosa.
Riding discipline doesn't matter. The type of tack is irrelevant. The only age requirement is 10 and over.
What matters is knowing your horse(s) front to back, top to bottom, understanding their body language, idiosyncrasies, and habits.
Maybe you want to learn something new, brush up on some lost skills, or need a new perspective.
I want to keep this as feasible as possible in order to help anyone who is interested.
I can come to you or you can come to me (adults only on my farm, as it is a working farm not a lesson barn) to work along side some schoolmasters who can help build confidence, or some green beans to learn from the ground up. Possibly learn a new perspective, or just add some tools to your tool belt.

DM me for availability and pricing options. The more days in one week you sign up for, the more discounts applied.

05/27/2026

05/23/2026

Saturday morning lesson essentials 😎

05/20/2026

These photos are almost 20 years apart!
Remember our sweet broodie, Loretta? Lancer II x Cor de la Bryere x Raimondo
She is 25 years old and living her best low level AA/trail life in Kentucky. 😍😍😍
Clearly she is aging backwards and we love to see it.
Her last filly, Opal, is coming along so beautifully too 🥰

05/19/2026

The value is in the education. Making a profit is like playing scratch offs.

Ok I have a little dilemma I want to run by you and get your opinion on. Bear with me, I promise you it’s horse related.
2 years ago I bought a brand new truck, loaded with option, the top of the top as far as duallies are concerned. It was quite expensive and I had to pay $105,000 but I needed it and I really wanted to buy something nice.
Since then I have driven it 80,000 miles, I did scrape it in a few places (oops… my bad) so it’s not quite as nice than when I got it.
I’m ready to list it, and here is what I was thinking. I would like to price it around $155,000.
Why $155,000? It’s simple, so like I said I paid $105,000 for it, then I put diesel, DEF (why do we have to use DEF now, fr), I replaced the tires (all 6 of them a few times), fuel filter, air filter, brake pads), insurance. Also the price of the trucks has gone up and in the show room similar vehicles are going for $125,000 nowadays. So yeah between the purchase price, the expenses and the inflation I think It’s worth 155,000.
Do you think I’m being reasonable and do you think I will find a buyer?
If I came up with this logic you would all tell me that I’m crazy. And that I should sell it for $75,000 and go on with my life. Right?

So why is it that every single person who buys a horse wants to make a profit on it when they have to sell it. And expect to get their expenses back and feel cheated when you tell them that they will actually have to sell their horse for less than what they originally paid for it?
You see if you imported a 1m30 horse and you are now campaigning in the 2’6 adults with questionable results because after all you are there to have fun and you are still learning so you chip here and there , then don’t expect to make a dime and don’t be sad if you get less than what you paid for your horse.
Unless your horse is dramatically better (you got your horse as a 5YO tripping over crossrails and it’s now winning the 3’3 greens) or if you bought your horse as a 1m40 horse in Europe and you put a decent 1m40 show record on him in the US) then you need to accept that it’s ok to not make money or to even get less than you paid for it in the first place.
Everybody treats horses like real estate, buy horse, keep horse, expect value to go up, sell for a profit.
But horses are closer to the car market, you buy said horse, you use it, you get value out of said use, you pay for maintenance you sell and upgrade, or you lease or whatnot and the value depreciate in the meantime.
Again I’m not saying that everybody should lose their shirt while owning horses, I’m just saying that the new expectation is that owning a horse is a profitable venture. IT IS NOT… so when it’s time to put a price on your horses, be realistic about what your horse is worth compared to horses with similar traits who recently sold. If your neighbor prices his 21YO trail riding QH for $85,000 that doesn’t mean that you should price your own 23YO QH for $75k. It just means that your neighbor is delulu and will keep his horse forever.
The difference between horses and cars is that you can’t park your horse in a garage. So month after month your expenses go up and you have a risk of injuries. When selling horses, try to be realistic and don’t chase the market.

05/19/2026

Being humbled by this this amazing creature I started myself is one thing, but being proud to jump her over an entire course i built myself is a whole new level happy feels 😍

05/18/2026

Nice rainy day lesson today. So proud of this kiddo for sticking it out in a torrential downpour learning pieces of her very 1st dressage test.
She exuded confidence and determination, even when her horse was not happy about getting soaked. She was a great horsewoman, softly encouraging him that everything was okay.
Very happy with her ride and her horse 😊

05/18/2026

ImAGoodFella 🥰❤️

05/16/2026

Let's talk about hoof care.
This sweet guy has a farrier appointment, for those who will be immediately drawn to the wear on his feet and will likely feel the need to say something 😎.
If you look at the difference in the color on these two hooves, you should notice that roughly ⅔ down from the coronet band the hooves are darker that the bottom ⅓. Why? Because almost 8 months ago he was put on better quality feed that has been supporting him from the inside out. There are no quick fixes to long term hoof health. Great nutrition, time, patience, and diligence are key
He also has always had great circulation in his feet and soft tissue because he gets a lot of turn out.
MOVEMENT = MEDICINE.
I always like looking at the horses feet because they tell a story.
How often to you take the time to really look at your horses hooves?

05/15/2026

This is something we don't talk about often in the equestrian industry that riding ability and teaching ability are not the same skill set. They are not even close relatives. A rider can be genuinely talented - balanced, feel, good hands, years of competition experience and still be a mediocre instructor. An instructor who was never a particularly exceptional rider can be extraordinary in the arena with students.

The two things develop independently and conflating them is one of the most common mistakes the industry makes when it comes to how instructors are trained and how they train themselves. Here is what the gap actually looks like and what it takes to close it:

1. Knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach it are completely different skills

A talented rider often cannot explain what they are doing because most of what they do is automatic and feels like second nature. The feel they have developed over years of riding lives in their body and not in their conscious awareness. Ask them to explain how they ride a half halt and they will tell you something vague about feeling it because that is genuinely how they experience it. That is not a useful teaching instruction. Breaking an automatic physical skill down into transferable language that a beginner can act on is a completely separate cognitive task from performing the skill itself. It requires the ability to step outside your own experience and reconstruct it from the perspective of someone who has never felt what you feel and that is genuinely hard work that most talented riders have never been asked to do.

2. The curse of competence is real

The better you ride the harder it often is to teach beginner riders. Not because you do not care but because the gap between your experience and theirs is so large that it is difficult to remember what it felt like to not know. The things that feel obvious and automatic to you are genuinely invisible to your student. The correction that seems self evident from where you are standing is completely opaque from where they are sitting. The best instructors develop the ability to step back inside the beginner experience and teach from there. Not from the top of their own competence looking down.

3. Teaching requires a completely different set of tools than winning a blue ribbon

Patience for a learning pace that feels frustratingly slow. The ability to explain one concept twelve different ways until the right one lands. An understanding of how different people learn whether visually, kinesthetically, auditorily and the flexibility to shift your approach based on what is actually working. The emotional intelligence to read when a student is frustrated, scared, or shut down and respond accordingly. None of these things are developed in the saddle. They are developed through deliberate study of teaching itself and through mentorship, through studying how learning works, through teaching a lot of students and paying close attention to what helps them and what does not.

4. Your own riding experience is a resource and not a curriculum

The way you were taught is not automatically the right way to teach. Many instructors default to replicating their own training experience without ever examining whether it was actually good. The instructor who was pushed hard and responds by pushing their students hard. The instructor who learned through repetitive drilling and teaches the same way regardless of whether it is working. The instructor who was never taught to explain why and so never explains why to their own students. Your experience gives you material to draw from but only if you are willing to examine it critically and choose what to keep and what to leave behind.

5. The transition from rider to instructor requires a deliberate shift in focus

When you are riding, the horse and your body are the primary relationship. When you are teaching, the student and their development are the primary relationship. Many instructors spend years in the arena still partially focused on what the horse is doing rather than what the student is experiencing. The moment you fully commit to the student as your primary subject and not the exercise, not the technical correctness of the movement but the human being in the saddle and what they need right now to take the next step then your teaching changes fundamentally.

6. Seek out education in teaching not just in riding

Most riding instructors invest heavily in their riding education through clinics, lessons, competitions, but minimally in their teaching education. The two need equal investment if you want to be genuinely excellent at both. Study how people learn. Find a mentor who is an exceptional teacher regardless of their riding level. Observe instructors in other disciplines and other sports. Read about motor learning and sports psychology. The science of how humans develop physical skills is directly applicable to everything that happens in your arena and most instructors have never touched it.

The best riding instructors are not always the best riders. They are the ones who took the gap between knowing and teaching seriously enough to close it; deliberately, over time, with genuine commitment to the craft of instruction as its own discipline. Riding got you to the arena but learning how to actually become an instructor is what keeps your students there.

Here is something worth saying from my personal experience. I had to work for everything I learned and figure out how to break it down piece by piece before it made any sense to my body. That struggle gave me something that naturally talented riders often do not have - the ability to meet a student exactly where they are and find the explanation that works for them specifically because I remember what it felt like to not get it.

What was the biggest shift you made in your thinking when you went from rider to instructor?