Pepper goes swimming…

Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 8:40 pm

It was sunny and warm yesterday. The temperature was about 10c at one point. We planned to take Pepper out to the beach if it stayed sunny as the weather forecast said. In the morning we took Pepper out for a little walk in the wood. We met Nelson, a male black Labrador, and his owner who was mostly on the phone when we met them. Pepper played with Nelson for a while and came back to us when he saw me holding a new stick. When we were at the second exit path, Nelson’s owner called Nelson while he was on the way down to the pond with Pepper and us, Nelson ran back to his owner. Pepper ran after him. We were still half way to the pond. We called Pepper and he came to us immediately. Nelson’s owner stopped talking on the phone and shouted at us “Well done!”. It was because many times that we met them he had to help us get Pepper. That was the first time that he did not help us and we managed to make Pepper come to us willingly. I shouted back “Thank you” with a big smile on my face. HG and I were so proud of Pepper. He actually made my day yesterday.

After the morning walk we put Pepper in his crate for his morning nap and we sneaked out for weekly shopping. When we came back, fed Pepper and had our lunch, HG took Pepper to the wood to do his business while I prepared things for the beach. We went to the beach in Dirleton called Yellowcraig. It was quite busy because it was such a beautiful day. Unfortunately the tide was in so the beach was not quite good. Pepper tried to pull us into the sea and the first thing he did was trying to drink the sea water and realised that it was not the same as in the river. At first we thought we might not be able to let him off the leash because of the other dogs and people but we thought we should give him a chance to play and it also gave us a chance to see if we could control him or not. I threw his ball into the sea and he went to fetch it. He hopped to get his ball in the water like a kangaroo. He did not afraid of the wave that came into his face. He totally loves it. He could just go to fetch the ball all day. There were 2-3 dogs tried to join us but Pepper did not care much. All he cared about was the ball. He kept looking at me and when he could not see the ball in my hands he looked into the sea and tried to find it. It was so amazing that he loved to fetch the ball more than playing with the other dogs.

Pepper was totally soaked when we stopped. When we were on our way back to the car park, we met Wallace and Moray, the two Gordon Setters who live in the same village as us.

Pepper played with them for a while before we went back to the car. I cleaned Pepper a bit just to get some sand of him. He was a bit dry when we were in the car but we decided to give him a proper wash when we were home (because he smelled of the sea in the car). While I was drying him he whined a wee bit I could tell that it was his tired whine. It took me a while before I finished because I want to make sure that he was totally dry otherwise he might get a cold.