Te Akau Friday Update

David writes:

It's been a very busy week at Te Akau with a few changes but everything is going really well.   I really hope Jason gets a win in the weekend with his final runners with Te Akau. He has black type runners at Riccarton (Angelica Hall) and Te Rapa (Unsurpassed).

For our owners who have not met Steve and Lynley Autridge before, you will enjoy that experience. One added advantage that we will now have is having an additional stable at the Matamata track where we will concentrate on having our colts.  Most of our fillies and geldings will remain at our main current stable where we can let them go out into lovely paddocks each day after track work.  As usual our assistant trainer Pam Gerard will be in charge of that and she is one of the very best horsewomen in the world bar none!

Today we sent the last unit of ox to the works and tomorrow the last unit of bulls is going for the season. This just leaves us with about 600 fat lambs to sell in the next month and then there is nothing left to sell until the beginning of November.

We have had a terrific year on the farm and although we did have a dry summer we are going into the winter with a beautiful amount of grass - probably the most I have seen at Te Akau Stud. Next week we will be drenching and weighing up all the stock and set stocking them for the winter.

The team is pretty happy with the way the horses went at the trials yesterday at Te Teko. We are also very pleased for Dan Miller who had his first win in the first race at Riverton for the season. From next week the horses will be trained under the Autridge/Richards partnership. I think quite a few people are surprised how I have promoted Jamie but we probably all forget that Mark Walker was training the Te Akau team horses at that age. Both are intelligent people with a great work ethic and both have an innate understanding of what makes a horse happy.

There is some great racing coming up at Te Rapa tomorrow and Karyn and I will be there cheering on the tangerine!  Well Karyn will be working as Chairman to be fair!

The breaking in of our yearlings is part of the work we do at Te Akau Stud. I just love watching the horses being ridden for the first time. James Jackson has enormous talent at educating these young horses. One colt that is currently impressing us is the O'Reilly colt from Sydney. He is headed on a very successful course being out of a stakes' winning Zabeel mare - the same cross as the likes of Silent Achiever and O'Marilyn. This colt looks a Derby winner if I have ever seen one.

We are syndicating him at $20,750 per 10% share including ALL costs until 30 April next year. We start promoting this colt in the media next week so if you want to be involved please get in touch ASAP as shares in colts like this normally sell very quickly.

Have a great weekend!