The saddle has landed

...and might be going back from whence it came.

Again.

I ordered this fucking thing on April 17th of last year which made it one year and twelve days for it to be delivered to my ass. With the weight of that sitting on it, I was expecting to swing my leg over and have angels sing. Or at the very least be instantly turned into a Grand Prix rider.

Instead I was decidedly underwhelmed.

It's a pretty saddle. For $4k it better be. Right off the bat though, you can see that the "forward flap" is essentially straight and the front end sits low. She ended up shimming the front of my Mattes to lift the front....while saying that, "Sometimes we shim for the rider and not the horse!" Yeah, okay. 

I had to drop my stirrups a hole to not have my knee shooting over the flap. This left me reaching for the stirrups and in subsequent rides feeling like I was losing especially the right one outright. Needless to say I was in full meltdown mode trying to figure out WTF I was going to do when I returned this saddle as wildly unsatisfactory. I absolutely cannot dick around for another year finding something. 

So do I go to another fitter? Because the trust level is lowwww with this one now. But she took my County in on $2k trade. Does that only count as store credit? Or is she going to completely refund me the $4k this saddle cost? WHY DO THESE EVEN NEED TO BE QUESTIONS?!

I had Opie's PEMF lady take some pics for me in the saddle so I could see if I was being completely overdramatic and just needed to adjust to a longer dressage leg etc etc. 

As soon as I got on she was like, "Your stirrups don't look too long at all. If anything they still look to short."

OMG STFU THEY ARE NEVER GETTING LONGER.

It actually ended up being a more informative, helpful five minutes with her than it was in alllll the time I spent with the fitter. She took some video, made a bunch of observations, and then brought me over and yanked the tiny jumper blocks the fitter had put in out and repositioned them a couple inches lower. That instantly made my leg feel more stable and pushed it back out of a chair seat. We then repositioned them from their lower point further back. That helped even more. This took all of two seconds and made me go from "This saddle is gone" to "Maybe we can work with this". 

I'm still going to get DL's opinion on it on Friday for my lesson. That will be my seven days to return it no strings attached and I already told the fitter it was contingent upon my trainer's approval. 

Still. That is A LOT of money to feel meh about something that's theoretically going to last me for my young horse's entire career.