Here Bruno and I are at our favorite, secret Lake Michigan shoreline in Leelanau County practicing multiple water retrieves on dummies I typically throw or launch 40-60 yards into Lake Michigan. Today was a calm day with virtually no waves, but in August, conditions were much different.
My wife Christine, a woman who was German Shorthaired Pointer breeder from the Lansing area and her two male GSPs, my GSP Bruno, and I all visited this very same site on the hot August evening after our day-long Northern Michigan Chapter NAVHDA dog tests. Bruno didn't compete in the tests because I had volunteered this day to assist with the Natural Ability Tests and to grill burgers and dogs for lunch. However, this Lansing woman and her two GSPs did test today, and afterward they asked Christine and me if we'd bring them to a pleasant Lake Michigan beach where they could go swimming and cool down. Why not? It had been a very hot day, and swimming in Lake Michigan sounded refreshing!
So naturally, I brought along my retrieving dummies and launchers, but I was somewhat concerned because a strong onshore breeze had picked up since late afternoon and was now generating two-feet-high rollers. This lady from Lansing, being unfamiliar with the perils present, almost immediately launched one of the retrieving balls 60+ yards into the lake and tried to get her two male GSPs to retrieve the ball, but her dogs wouldn't retrieve the ball for they couldn't see it--the ball was well hidden in the water-surface layer and by the action of the two-foot-high rollers.
"Great!" I thought to myself. "I don't want to loose that ball," I grimmaced silently knowing that finding a perfectly-fitting replacement ball for my launcher would be a challenge. So I asked the Lansing lady to call her dogs to her side, while I prepared to send my GSP Bruno on this very challenging blind retrieve. By now the sun had set, and the light was diminishing quickly. I commanded Bruno to heel, squared my shoulders perpendicular to the direction I wanted to send him on this retrieve, and ordered him to fetch while simultaneously motioning with my right hand and arm the direction I wanted him to proceed. All summer long I trained Bruno to go on multiple and blind retrieves in similar manner, but that training had usually been conducted on land, and the few times we practiced wet retrieves, they had been done on small and always calm inland lakes and ponds. Conditions here was seriously and significantly different. After Bruno had swum out from shore 40 yards precisely along the line I had sent him, I whistled for him to whoa and to look at me for new directions, for the waves had moved the ball to a new location, and I needed to adjust the direction he was swimming. He complied perfectly, and with my hand-and-arm motions I redirected him to swim in a more south-easterly direction. All of this was much more challenging than it sounds, for we would regularly loose eye sight of one another in the cresting and ebbing action of the two-foot Lake Michigan rollers. After Bruno had swum another 25 yards to the SE, I shouted excitedly to alert him that he was near and getting close to the ball, "Right there! Right there!" And as trained, he began to alertly search for the ball in the surface film of the rollers.
"Bingo! He's got it!" I excitedly announced to a concerned Christine and Lansing lady. Bruno turned and swam 60+ yards with the rollers back to the shore, climbed out and gently placed the ball in my outreached right hand. "Good boy!" I told him proudly. That was certainly an understated compliment on my part.
The Lansing lady swiftly turned and said to her two GSP male dogs, who were sitting onshore beside her and watching with her Bruno's superb long blind retrieve, "Now boys, that's the way you retrieve!"
Well said Lansing lady, and well done, Bruno.
