Vessels to team with Allred, PCQHRA for yearling/broodmare sale

Vessels Stallion Farm won’t be hosting a yearling and broodmare sale this year, but the Bonsall quarter horse facility will be teaming with Edward C. Allred and the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association for a two-day sale which will take place October 1-2 at the Los Alamitos Racecourse facility.

The Los Alamitos Equine Sale replaces the Pacific Coast Yearling and Mixed Stock Sale for which the PCQHRA was the primary administrator. The PCQHRA will be the primary administrator of the Los Alamitos Equine Sale.

“Allred and Vessels are stressing for yearlings and mares quality, not quantity,” said Rich Decker, the farm manager of Vessels Stallion Farm. “They are well, well, very well bred, yearlings and mares.”

Despite the emphasis on quality rather than quantity — an emphasis which includes offspring of First Down Dash as well as from dams whose offspring have been in the Vessels family for more than 40 years — the July 15 consignment deadline saw 464 horses consigned for the sale. Those horses consist of 310 yearlings, 116 broodmares and 38 mixed stock. All yearlings consigned to the sale are eligible for the Grade 1 PCQHRA Breeder’s Futurity and the Grade 2 PCQHRA Derby.

For eleven years Vessels Stallion Farm hosted the Vessels-Schvaneveldt sale. Last year Blane Schvaneveldt began teaming with John Andreini.

“We wanted to align ourselves with another successful California breeder as we had in the past,” Decker said.

Allred is a nine-time American Quarter Horse Association champion breeder. He was the breeder of Hawkish, who won the 2004 PCQHRA award for the champion three-year-old colt, and of Catchmeinyourdreams, who was the 2004 AQHA champion aged gelding. In 2004 the PCQHRA gave Vessels Stallion Farm a Breeder Special Achievement Award, provided First Down Dash, the all-time quarter horse racing leading sire who stands at Vessels Stallion Farm, the Three Bars Award for the outstanding stallion and selected Vessels-bred Buccaneer Beach as the champion stallion. The AQHA named Buccaneer Beach as the champion aged stallion and the Vessels-bred Hardly Hateful as the champion two-year-old filly.

“It seemed like the right fit,” Decker said of teaming with Allred and PCQHRA.

Decker believes that past PCQHRA sales had lacked the pedigree of other sales. “It was more of a blue-collar sale,” he said.

“We’re going to try to change the appearance,” Decker said. “We’re going to try to make this sale a premier sale just as the Vessels-Schvaneveldt sale was for the past eleven years.”

The two-day sale will offer the broodmares, weanlings, racing-age horses and mixed stock on October 1 and yearlings on October 2.