Hunter championships: Frances Cash, winner of six Dublin hunter championships, is aiming for her seventh supreme title in the main arena at Ballsbridge this morning and goes in double-handed.
Based in Prosperous, Co Kildare, Cash won her first Dublin championship in the pony ranks as a 10-year-old when her 12.2-hand After Hours "buried" her before his class but then went on to claim the honours.
Cash has lost none of her enthusiasm for the job, and will be hoping one of her two charges will take her to the top yet again.
She booked her first championship place in yesterday's opening class, the older light-weight division, winning with Peter and Louise Curling's seven-year-old Hochmagandy, which had finished third in Clonmel on its only previous outing.
Cash then rounded off the day in a similar vein when heading the final class, the four-year-old medium-weights with Fintan Flannelly's Atlantic Mist, which turned the tables on its Balmoral vanquisher, Valerie McBride's Valamiro in Ring One yesterday.
Cash will be riding the four-year-old Atlantic Mist first this morning, and expects the youngster to flourish in the main arena, but knows that she will face strong competition for the weight cup from Fintan Purcell's year older Simon, which Gerry Stack rides.
She'll then get the leg-up onto the Curlings' horse, when her biggest threat to her title hopes will come from Ringwood Dunbeacon, which Ann O'Grady steered to victory in the four-year-old light-weights after overcoming the challenge from Sylvia Clifford's Bonnie Prince, which dropped to third in the final line-up.
O'Grady claimed last year's Dublin supreme honours with another light-weight, the unrelated Ringwood Deacon, which is now competing on the British eventing circuit with American Charlie Plumb. This year's model, Ringwood Dunbeacon, is also bound for England, but new owner Gill Jerme, who will take the horse immediately after Dublin, has a showing career mapped out for the youngster with Katie Moore in the saddle.
Ringwood Dunbeacon, like Cash's medium-weight hope Atlantic Mist, was bred in west Cork, and O'Grady is confident that the Abdullah gelding will be a comfortable conveyance for the judges today. The horse, she says, is "impeccably mannered", so much so that even her 80-year-old father Michael Leonard is regularly aboard at home in Newcastlewest, Co Limerick.