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Old 10-10-2021, 03:38 PM   #3
DavidM
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City: Litchfield, Ct
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 6,785
We started cruising with our first Sheltie as a seven year old dog. We couldn't train her to do it on deck. She would hold it for 24 hour passages. I remember once anchoring behind Crab Cay off of Great Abaco Island after an all night and half day passage. I took her ashore to the coral reef to pee. No grass or sand anywhere. She wandered around for a few minutes looking for a suitable place and gave up and squatted.... for a long time.

After she passed we got a Sheltie puppy. It was a bit tedious but we trained her to go on a potty pad, a 2x2-1/2' square of blotter with a plastic backing. Once we got her well trained to do it on land, I cut a 3 x 3' square of outdoor carpeting and set it up on the bow with a potty pad on top. She took to that easily. Then I removed the potty pad and eventually she did it on the carpet.

The reason for the carpet was that I tied a short line to a corner and threw it overboard for an hour or so while at anchor. It always came up reasonably clean so I didn't have to deal with soiled potty pads.

We would just point to the front of the boat and say "go potty" when we thought it was time. Once we sent her up and she quickly came back. We sent her back and after a few seconds she came back barking and running in circles. I went forward to the bow and sure enough the carpet had blown off the bow and was hanging in the water by its tie off. I made sure that didn't happen again.

For rough passages both did fine. I remember beating (this was a sailboat at the time) into a 25 kt wind heeling 20 degrees with the dog below. My wife asked me to go down and check on her. She was wedged into the galley nook fast asleep.

The only real problems we had was barking when we left her on board and went ashore without her. She would annoy our neighbors at anchor.

David
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