Haven's Searchlight x The Last Flash

"Spirit" is a 15.1 hh black bay mare who carries the sabino gene (she has a large enough belly splash to quality for registry as a pinto).  Spirit had a long and very successful carriage driving career with several people, including Mark Schofield.  She was shown up and down the east coast for many years, winning in shows such as Walnut Hill.  Spirit had been trained under saddle but had not been ridden in many, many years.  In 2002, I had the pleasure of obtaining her as a broodmare.  She produced a beautiful filly, She's No Angel.  She found herself in harness and under saddle once again following the weaning of her filly.  She is an old hand at driven dressage, having been trained to Advanced Level by Mark Schofield.  She has been a great teacher for me, having the patience of a saint as I struggled with trying to master a proper bend and 3 to 5 loop serpentines.  In addition, she proved to have great potential for ridden dressage (my real love) but, unfortunately, it looked like we would be sidelined when I seriously injured my knee.  Enter Phantom's long time rider, Allison Lokey, who graciously volunteered to save the day.  Allison had shown hunter/jumpers but had never had any dressage training.  In 3 short weeks, she and Spirit mastered First Level tests 1 and 2 with me coaching from the ground on crutches.  Off we went to the show where they placed 3rd out of 30 entries.  Pretty impressive for rider new to dressage and a horse who was still quite "rusty" under saddle! We have attended classical dressage clinics with Tina Cope (a student of Bettina Drummond).  Realizing that Spirit's biological clock is ticking away, I made the decision to retire this great mare from showing (at least for now!) to return her to broodmare status. 

Spirit competing in scurry at Walnut Hill.

Spirit and Allison in their 3 week "crash course" for ridden dressage.

Spirit and Allison competing at First Level.

Click here to view Spirit's extended pedigree.

Watch for her 2007 foal!  Spirit will be bred shortly to Hallmandale Amber's Pride, an "old blood" Hackney stallion, standing at Shallowmyre in Ridgefield, Washington.  His photos may be found here and his extended pedigree here. 

He has produced beautiful, classic Hackney horse foals to date out of 2 similarly bred mares last year so we are very excited about the prospects of crossing these bloodlines.  The resulting foal will have an 8 Generation Coefficient of Inbreeding of 2.80% which is well within our goal of maintaining/improving genetic diversity in this breed.