Riggs, looking almost regal!
Many people have asked us what it's like to cruise with our 11 month old mini golden doodle puppy Riggs, so here goes...
I can't count how many times we have said to each other "What were we thinking?!" over the last couple of months! Don't get me wrong, we absolutely adore our fur baby Riggs. He is such fun, so curious, so full of personality and the zest for life that he just makes us smile. He is very affectionate and loves to give us hugs and kisses in the morning when we let him out of his crate or if we have been gone (like to take a shower in another room of the boat...he considers that "gone"). He loves everyone he meets, especially pretty women, kids and all other dogs. Roosters and cats are another story though. He wants to kill them. Riggs is a true sailor, has great balance and is a good sport even when the seas have gotten rough and he can't walk around. Sometimes he does make groaning noises when its really rough, but usually he just finds a good corner to hunker down in and sleep. He did throw up one on one rough trip, but I had changed his dog food that morning without phasing it in (bad parent).
One of the best things is Riggs uses the "puddle pad" on the foredeck with no issues. Once we get anchored somewhere, we bring the pad out and he uses it whenever he needs to go. He goes up on deck by himself unless the weather is very rough and then we take him up with a leash. We could never get our previous dog Razzo to do this. We have a line tied to the mat and we dunk it in the sea water a couple times per day to rinse it which really controls the odors. He does do a walking poop unfortunately and so not all of the deposits always make it onto the mat, but hey, we can't expect perfection!
The puppy pad is a grass turf mat that sits in a tray to catch any liquids. We just dump the tray over the side and dunk the mat in the water.
He has been amazingly flexible about the cruising life. On a multi-day passage when we don't get off the boat, you would think a high energy puppy would go stir crazy, but he is surprisingly content to sleep, play with his toys (he especially likes to play catch where he catches the toy in the air), chew on bones and snuggle. When we do get to land he is ecstatic and pulls on his leash and walks on his back feet and can hardly contain his excitement.
He is still a very flexible puppy and sleeps in the oddest positions.
Riggs has developed into an excellent swimmer and loves to play in the shallows. It's a great way for him to get some exercise. If we throw one of his coconuts out into the deep water, he will willingly go swim out to retrieve it. He loves dinghy rides, but once we are near land or a dock, he tries to jump or climb out which can be really annoying as evidenced by the claw marks on my legs, not to mention, it's not safe. We are working on the command "wait", but still have a way to go with that. If we are going into a beach, once we are in fairly shallow water, we will let him jump off the dinghy to swim into shore, but he has to wait for the release command. He is fairly tolerant about his fresh water rinse after every swim once we get back onto the boat and he dries quickly in the wind and sun.
We were concerned about how we were going to keep Riggs safe in the boat before we left and we decided to always have a life jacket on him and a harness and leash attached to the boat whenever we are moving. He has a bit of an impulsive personality (he jumped out of a partially open window of a moving car when he was a puppy) and we could picture him jumping overboard to chase a dolphin or even worse a shark! We worried he wouldn't tolerate all of the tethering and would get hot in the life jacket, but he seems fine with it. He can move around the cockpit, but he can't get beyond the side decks. When we are in the middle of anchoring or putting sails up or some activity that takes both of us, it is really nice not to have to worry about where he is. Once we are anchored, the life jacket and tether come off and he is free to roam about the boat.
One of his favorite places to lay is on a sail bag on deck. He can survey the world and still keep an eye on us in the cockpit.
So all of this sounds great, right, so why are we asking ourselves what have we done? There are two things that drive us crazy. When he was younger he would just lose it and bark wildly at other dogs, just out of control. At obedience class, we had to go in the corner behind barricades so he couldn't see other dogs. The trainer labelled him as a "highly reactive dog". Through the use of a bark collar which beeps, then vibrates, and finally shocks him if he barks more than twice, he has learned a lot of self control. I swore I would never use one of those awful things on MY dog... and then we got Riggs. We tried citronella collars, a beeper collar that we could control, bark activated vibration collars-nothing had any impact. When we are going somewhere where we think his barking might bother people we put it on him. He has gotten so much better, both when he is wearing the collar and not. Dogs can bark at him and he wont even bark back most times now which is amazing. He will make little whimpering and odd quiet noises like he really wants to bark, but he is able to control himself. So for the most part, the barking is under control.
The big problem that is unsolved as of yet is that he has awful separation anxiety. He wants to have eyes on both of us at all times. If one of us leaves the boat in the dinghy, he is very upset and watches for us to come back and whines. We had this problem at home before we left and worked through it over several months so that we could leave him in the kitchen alone for a few hours without him getting overwrought. It's a pain to have to take him everywhere we go and he isn't welcome in many restaurants, the laundromat, grocery store, etc. We can't snorkel together because he freaks out if we are both in the water. There will be times, like when we are checking into a new country when we cannot take him with us.
We wanted to make sure he was very comfortable with life on the boat before we started "conditioning" him to being left. Conditioning involves putting him in his crate with a kong that is filled with peanut butter, food and other treats which he absolutely loves, turning a fan on for white noise, calmly saying goodbye and going away in the dinghy for 10 minutes or so. When we come back, we don't act all excited to see him and just calmly greet him (we have read all of the books). Riggs is beside himself with happiness though, jumping on our heads, licking us to death, and wiggling every part of his body.
The first couple times we left him, he was still barking and crying when we got back. The third time he was quiet when we returned, listening for the dinghy I think. We thought, this is great progress, maybe we will be able to leave him for an extended time sometime. The fourth time was a different story. Again, it was quiet when we returned, but this time he had managed to poke his nose through the slots of the crate and get a hold of one of the cushions. He shredded a 4 inch hole in the cushion and had started a second hole while we were gone in those ten minutes. I wanted to feed him to the sharks I was so mad!!!! The fifth time, we were smarter and moved the crate away from anything he could chew on so he ripped a hole in his supposedly indestructible Kong bed. Sigh....Clearly we still have work to do. He is not quite one year old and people keep telling me stories of how their dogs changed when they turned two so we are hanging onto that hope and will keep doing the conditioning in the hopes he will eventually figure out that we always come back and the world isn't coming to an end.
It's just a good thing we love this little guy! And yes, we are pretty besotted with him!
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