Swimming Success

One of Tara's favourite places to go is the beach. She's not fussy, any beach will do. It was one of the first places we took her back when we first got her; out to Ettrick Bay in the camervan.

Tara, circa 2012

But she's never really been one for the water, she'd go in and paddle but she was a little wary of it and we weren't always keen on letting a mad labrador get soaking wet and then into our clean car.

But these last couple of weeks we've had some nice sunny days on the weekends and my early finish Fridays so we've made an effort to take her to the beach. And around a week ago, Tara finally learnt to swim!

What's more, not only has she learnt to swim, she's also learnt to retrieve. Side note: my labrador retriever isn't so hot at the whole retriever part of her breed, she's very good at fetching and carrying but pretty awful at giving things to you once she's got them!

I'm fairly certain that it's because we coaxed her deeper into the water by saying "Look! Go get it!" and tossing stones into the water around the depth we were encouraging her into. She took this to mean "Look! Seaweed! Bring it to us!" so now she fearlessly enters the water, wagging and paddling the whole time, and grabs a mouthful of seaweed, then brings it back to us. Once her seaweed has been deposited at the sea's edge with us, she wades back in and does it again.

I think we could've spent a few hours sitting at the beach on Friday afternoon just letting her clear the sea of seaweed.

And we took her again for a brief jaunt on Saturday morning as well. This time the tide was too far out for her to go swimming but it didn't stop her from having a good old paddle session, and yep, seaweed hunting too!