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30/4/08 Photos from this year’s ride

Some pictures from jumps not covered by the official photographers (SF Digital) are now available. Click here to see them. Please e-mail the Secretary, Susie Bell (info@haltonride.org.uk) for details of how to buy prints of any of these pictures.

27/4/08 7.15am: the ride is going ahead

It’s been dry over night, and the weather forecast is dry for most of the day, so the ride will go ahead.
The course is perfect this morning, and rain during the day will not stop the ride (we had to postpone in March not because of rain during the day, but because it had rained exceptionally heavily all night, and parts of the course were already flooded by 7am).

If anything disastrous happens (plague of locusts, foreign invasion) and we have to change our minds, this page will be updated as soon as any decision is taken, as will the RAF information line (01296 623535), and as before we’ll contact as many of you as we can by telephone.

26/4/08: news about photographs

Sadly, because of the rescheduling the official photographers, SF Digital, do not have enough staff available to print photos on site on the day at the ride. All of their photographs will be available from their website shortly after the ride as usual. Some photographs will be available on this site a couple of days after the ride as well. We hope to have photos printed on site again for next year’s ride.

24/4/08: the ride is full, but we need help

The rescheduled ride has sold out.

However, we are short of mounted stewards: if you could help us for a whole day or half day, we’ll feed you, and you can ride the course afterwards. If you can help us, please ring the secretary, Susie Bell, as soon as possible on 07929 217917.

Please note also that there is no course walking this weekend due to RAF commitments.

22/3/08: the new date really is April 27th 2008...

Some local sources are reporting the rescheduled ride will take place on other dates - please ignore them. The 2008 ride is now scheduled to take place on April 27th.

We appreciate that some of you will already have other commitments on that date, but April 27th is the first date we could arrange when all the people we need to make the ride happen are available.

To make the ride possible we need enough helpers in the days running up to the ride to prepare and flag the course, put up road signs and set up the office. On the day itself we need volunteers to staff the office and the check points, we need mounted stewards, RAF staff to organise the car parking and catering, and of course we also need ambulances, a vet, a horse ambulance, people to manage the road crossings, the farrier, the photographers and so on. Finding a date at short notice when all those people are available to help us is hard enough, but doing that and working round the needs of the RAF (Halton is a working airfield) and the Forestry Commission (the ride uses a stretch of woodland managed by them), and with an eye on other equestrian events in the area and the long range weather forecast, is... Well, put it this way, we’re hoping the April 27th will be sunny because that’s our day.

We hope you’ll be able to join us.

19/3/08: new date confirmed

We can at last, after a lot of running around and rearranging, confirm a new date: the ride will now take place on Sunday April 27th (weather permitting of course, but hopefully we won’t get the worst storm of the year again!). We can’t confirm any more details as yet, but as far as we know all arrangements will be the same. As soon as we can confirm, this page will be updated, and normal srvice will be resumed on the website.

18/3/08: no date new yet

We had been hoping to arrange a new date in March for the ride, but RAF commitments mean we’ve been unable to get a March licence at all (and the long range weather forecast the RAF have given us is none too kind either, so perhaps no March date is just as well with the airfield and Happy Valley needing time to dry out).

We’re still very much committed to the 2008 ride going ahead, but currently it looks likely that the first new date we can get will be in mid to late April rather than March. As before, we’ll post more information as soon as we have it.

16/3/08: the postponement

We’re all extremely disappointed that we had to postpone the ride today. The decision to postpone was taken at 8am this morning after a course inspection confirmed our fears that even with the rain easing the course just wouldn’t have been safe to ride. Looking out of the secretary’s tent onto the airfield, it was obvious that all wasn’t well:

nothing waterlogged course nothing waterlogged course

Seabirds swimming on a cross-country course is never a good sign, and closer inspection didn’t improve matters:

nothing waterlogged course nothing waterlogged course

The decision to postpone the ride wasn’t taken lightly: disappointing 600 riders isn’t easy, and we know that a lot of you had to make special arrangements regarding transport and so on, but safety has to come first, and jumps with standing water on either the take-off or the landing side simply aren’t safe:

nothing waterlogged course nothing waterlogged course

Many of the jumps on the airfield had standing water on both take-off and landing sides this morning.

We considered going ahead with the ride on a shorter course, excluding the airfield entirely, but the situation in Happy Valley was no better, and many of the remaining jumps were also waterlogged, so even a reduced course wasn’t possible. And of course a ride round RAF Halton without the aeroplane jump, without the challenging brush fences up the back of the airfield, and without the beautiful run of jumps down Happy Valley wouldn’t have been much of a day out. (And the catering tent blew down in the high winds at lunchtime, which wouldn’t have helped matters).

We hope we managed to contact most of you - this website’s front page was updated with the news by 8.30am, and by then the committee had already started the long process of telephoning every entrant for whom we had a telephone number. At 9.15 an e-mail was sent to the Hunt’s e-mail group so that as many people as possible knew we’d had to postpone, whether they’d entered the ride or not.

We’re aware that we didn’t manage to contact everyone, and our apologies go out to those people who did make the journey to Halton only to find the ride wasn’t going ahead. Extra apologies are due to anyone who had a wasted journey having checked with the website or the secretary early in the morning when we still thought we’d be able to go ahead in some form.

What’s next?

We hope to be able to reschedule the ride, but we need to get new licences from the RAF which won’t be possible in time for the original reserve date. Currently we’re hoping the ride will be able to go ahead on either Sunday 30th March or the following Sunday, 6th April. We’ll update this page as soon as we have any further information, hopefully in the next couple of days (each time you visit it’s worth refreshing your browser, just to make sure you’re not seeing a cached version of this page).

In the meantime, we’re doing everything we can to make sure there is a Halton ride this year, and we hope you’ll be able to join us if we can confirm a new date, so that we can still help all the charities who were expecting a share of your sponsorship money - it would be such a shame if they lost out because of the weather.

Thanks very much for reading - we’d be very grateful if you’d pass on this information, and our apologies for the disappointment today, to anyone you know who has entered the ride but doesn’t have access to the internet.