Toe straps on Renegades

This is a photo of a couple of the boots that Bo wore today on the 50 at Cuyama, day 3 of the ride. I love these boots! I strapped these boots on Bo this morning and then rode 50 miles in them and never once even touched them.  Not once!!

We did everything today too – crossed water, quicksand type river crossings, walked, trotted and cantered uphill and through all sorts of terrain and various speeds.  Even through one good spook (Yes Bo, I *am awake*) and the boots never budged at all, never came off and like I said I never had to touch them even once all day!

I took Bo’s burgundy Renegades off tonight simply by undoing the top strap around his pastern, sliding the captivator back and then pulling the boot off. It was so quick and easy and all four hoof boots were off in just a couple of minutes. Then I rinsed them off in water and this is the end result. I didn’t undo the toe-straps before removal to speed things up. This way everything got cleaned on the surface too – which was good since we went through a couple of sandy river (quicksand type) crossings plus some mud leftover from yesterdays rain.

You can see in the photo how I attach the velcro toe straps. I use two of the O rings and get just enough strap through them both to allow a bit more to loop back under the second O ring. That holds things securely. In this case I was able to do the 50 miles even through water crossings without anything coming undone and didn’t need to do anything else – on all four boots.

I will undo the toe straps before I put the boots on again to make that easier. It’s nice at the end of the day when the boots were still muddy and dirty to not have to do that. It’s so easy to get these boots off, wow!

In conditions that are even wetter than this I might apply a zip-tie, but haven’t experienced the toe straps coming undone yet when I’ve folded them over this way. The key I think is to have enough surface area of the velcro so that it holds really well. That means that if you have more than an inch of strap hanging out after you tighten them that you should shorten/adjust your cable length so that you will have a larger surface area on the velcro.