The Journey Takes a Turn..........

Part One

WARNING!!

OK! Take a deep breath! Hold tight to your coffee, I wouldn't want anyone to spill something and wreck their computers over this! And please don't let your jaws dropping do any serious damage to you or your surroundings! There's just no way to ease into this so here goes..........




In mid October of 2008, I offered the horse, Scandalous Storm, to BG and WF (who up to this point I believed was BG's wife according to what BG had said) in trade for the training of my young horses that BG was really already doing for free. With a $30,000 price tag on the horse at that time, I figured I'd be able to get all of my young horses started well enough they would be safe for me to continue and that would be a big help in getting on with my dream.

BG and I hammered out the details. Training would be at $300 per month per horse and based on a five (5) day work week for five (5) horses. As part of our contract Storm would be shown beginning in 2009 including to nationals in Tulsa. I would receive a female boxer puppy from one of their litters from their female boxer who is a descendant of a dog I used to own.

BG joked that at that rate of training it would take him until October of 2010 to pay off the horse. I figured that was probably right by the time days were taken off for horse shows and such. It would be a long road but BG said it would be worth it AND it would be fun.

Storm being shown was an important part of this deal. Them showing Storm that would help to get my breeding program noticed and it would be accomplished without me having to contribute financially to the show expenses. That and getting other horses started were the only things that balanced out the loss of revenue I knew a horse like Storm would bring. This was the only way I could even consider this trade.

I couldn't afford the loss of $30,000 income. That kind of money would pay my expenses on this place for over a year but I thought this deal could make up for that in other ways. I thought if Storm was out there showing what my horses can do, along with his dad and Reflection, I should be able to pick up interest and even sales on those horses that were started at home.

It would also free me up so I would be able to focus on getting at least one of the other horses I had for sale in the ring, maybe Tag as a maturity horse. Since I knew Storm probably wouldn't have been sold until he was in the ring anyway and most likely not until nationals, I would be trading the money on the one horse for the possibility of making it up sooner on others. It looked like a win- win to me at the time. I suppose it would have been if things had gone as I'd planned AND more importantly as they'd committed to do.

There was another issue about the contract. Since I had paid board and training for Reflection, I wanted to include that in the contract as well. WF said that she couldn't afford to do that with board. She needed the revenue to pay her expenses but she did agree that I could take the amount of training I'd paid for Reflection and apply it against the next month's board for Reflection. The horse's training expense would be deducted from the amount owing on the contract and I would pay board for Reflection each month that he was there.

As for other terms of the contract BG said he was helping me with Legs as one friend to another. He had been doing that from almost the beginning of when I'd started schooling horses there and he didn't want that to change. He said the groundwork he was doing with Legs wouldn't count towards the contract and that groundwork was the only thing he was doing with Legs. It was something he wanted to do because of our friendship.

To be honest, had he wanted working Legs to count, I would have no longer allowed him to touch Legs. While I was curious to see what boxing would produce in my horse, I was not convinced it was getting the job done. I sure wasn't willing to pay for what he was doing. I was and am perfectly capable of getting the horse finished myself. I had no intentions then/nor will I ever pay another trainer to train Legs. That's just the way it is.......

The possession of the horse, Scandalous Storm, was relinquished to BG and WF as we hammered out the details. It seemed there was going to be no problem with those details so there was no sense in my hauling the horse back and forth when he was going to be theirs anyway. Leaving the stallion with them would free up one more space in my horse trailer so we could begin getting another horse going well enough to see the ring.

There was one "little" hitch in all of this right from the start. Once the details were determined we did NOT get any of this contract in writing although it was always my intention to do that. BG said he was going to help me with the formal writing of the contract since he had legal expertise and I did not. Yet, every time I brought up the fact we still needed to sit down and get that contract drawn up there was some excuse to put it off. It ended up no written contract was ever done. In the beginning I wasn't all that concerned about this because I trusted these people. That turned out to be a very big mistake.

To be continued.............

The New Journey Begins