WOW

So...I bought a saddle while I was in Florida.  Say hello to this beautiful piece of leather!  It is a WOW Saddle, and so far it is pretty awesome.

It is a very interesting concept.  It is completely modular, so any piece on the saddle can be taken off and switched for another.  I adore the flaps, the block is made for long legged people (YAY!) and it has a shallow area that makes a place for my knee to rest without riding over the block like it does in so many other saddles.

Another interesting feature is it has two stirrup bars.  It is kind of hard to see in the picture, but there is the low one (below my finger) then above it is a second longer one (to the right of my finger0.  This allows you to have two options for stirrup placement.

This is a picture of the underside of the saddle and you can see where the panel, flaps, and seat attach.  All of these can be changed.  The new panels can be put on the 1996 saddles (when they first started making them).  So, they don't force you to upgrade because they change where the attachments are, which is pretty awesome.

Another cool feature is you can have wool or air panels and apparently the Stinker has a strong preference for air.  We tried air and then switched to wool and he was very unhappy.  So air it was.  There are two places where air can be added or removed from the panels.

There are also a million different places to attach the billets.  You can get point billets, fore billets, Y billets, and probably some others that I forgot.  This is the front billet, the second one is passed through the panel.

The fitting for this saddle was extensive.  Partially because my horse is weird and breaks all the rules and partially because there are so many different ways to try things.  The saddle fitter built this saddle for me on the spot through lots and lots of trial and error.  By the time everything was said and done we had about a seven hour fitting session.  I couldn't believe Stinker cooperated for the whole thing.  He was such a little trooper.  The best part about it, was he was willing to walk (truly walk, not jig, not asking to trot) for over thirty minutes.  I think the saddle has his stamp of approval.