Callie keeps getting better at swimming. Since about day-three on our vacation here at Lake Arrowhead, Callie has been swimming with confidence — well, almost with confidence. She’s swimming without a leash now, but she’s still swimming between the shore line and our dock, which is a protected (by the dock) strip of water about forty feet wide. When we first throw her “floppy” in the water, she still hesitates for a few seconds. She wiggles back and forth sideways, working up the courage to go into the deeper water. But it just takes a few seconds, and off she goes!
Within that little strip of water, she is doing really well. She has to deal with a few weeds, once in a while, but she’s learned how to do that. So for about fifteen minutes a day, Callie is swimming out about forty feet, retrieving her floppy (like a floating frisbee), and swimming back to shore.
The other side of the dock, the water beyond Callie’s little strip and beyond the boat dock, is the open part of Lake Arrowhead. Well, it’s not really open. It’s still within the five-mile-per-hour buoys, but there is some boat traffic and some choppy water, especially if it’s windy — as it has been the last two weeks.
So we’re working hard with Callie inside the dock line, to make sure she “comes” when she is called in the water. The last thing we need is Callie deciding to swim straight out into the lake, beyond the no-wake buoys and into the water ski traffic.
This was never an issue with Jamie. Maybe because Jamie was four-years-old when she started swimming from this dock. Here, from “My Doggie Says…” is a picture of Jamie swimming with her floppy outside the dock line.
We know Callie is bred to swim, and we know, already, that she really loves to swim. So why all the fuss? Because we want to make sure she continues to have good experiences in the water. We want to make 100% certain that, when she graduates to the open lake, she will “fetch” the floppy and “come” when called. It’s getting harder all the time to get her out of the water, which means she really loves her swimming. And we can tell she appreciates our efforts to make it a good experience. That’s what dog-relationships are all about.
She’s close. But we’ll probably wait until later in the summer, when she’s grown a little stronger. After all, she’s just six months old.
I’m getting some fun video of Callie swimming, but it will have to wait until I get back to the main computer. I don’t have the download tools here.
