Dogs on board

TickledPink

For those of you that take their dog on their boats, have you made any specific adaptions to make them more comfortable? I was thinking of making the swimming platform slip free and looking for some non spill bowls.

TickledPink

I'm also a bit worried about toilet training 🙄

Ian

We have marine mat on the platform and cockpit. (Funny, our now nearly 6 month old Australian Labradoodle puppy is used to sliding on the hardwood floors at home so that confuses him!) Toilet wise - we bought a roll of fake grass and have used a boot tray and cut pieces of the grass to fit. We have one for the boat and one for home, we move it inside at night but on the deck or porch in the day and so he is used to the same thing when on the boat. When he is bigger I expect we’ll wean him off and take him walking to do the deed.

Liberty44140

We have a food/water bowl for her in the cabin and a water bowl in the cockpit which we keep full of ice and water as she doesn’t love the heat. We have a breed that was hard to potty train at home but she has never had an accident on one of our boats, she did have an accident on a friends boat when she was a puppy but never on ours. We have been trying to train her to pee on our swim platform while anchored out but no go, even for fake grass which I peed on to set the smell and nothing so we got an inflatable SUP so we can always take her in to the beach to go. Our platform is plasteak which gets hot so we use the transom shower a lot to water it and keep it cool for the dog. Other than a coupe doggy life jackets that’s about it. 

MH342

We found an inflatable SUP to be indispensable for the dog.  Our dog was never a huge fan of water (and I was never a huge fan of a wet, sandy dog on the boat) so there was a lot of carrying back and forth to the beach. The dog is so used to the SUP now, she’ll climb on it herself whenever she has to go ashore to pee and wait for us to paddle her ashore.  Add a pull line and we can get to shore and back all by herself. 

Also a life jacket is always recommended but not always practical at the dock, tied up, etc. As our dog aged and the chance of her missing the step from dock to swim platform increased, we bought a harness with a sturdy handle and keep it on her all weekend. She’s a decent swimmer but it gives us piece of mind to be able to easily get her back on the boat if she slips in.