Robert Cumbers says...

My 90 pound lab loves to swim, but has many "hang-ups," the stairs I built his went unused, no matter how much coaxing on my part. I was a little hesitant if he would use this ramp or not, but decided to give it a shot anyway. I decided to try it out in my neighbor's cove as the water was shallow and calm. It seems to be important that the platform gets secured pretty well, so I used a coupe of c-clamps to attach to the pier and tied off from there. I threw the ball a couple of times and nudged him toward the ramp, and was quite surprised that he took to it quite naturally. He also quickly figured out that using the ramp was easier than climbing the rock shoreline, so he was an easy convert. We spent the weekend using this method to crate a habit that he was comfortable with. I was excited to try it in open water the next weekend. We did one more run at the pier before heading out on the boat. This time I attached the platform to the struts below the deco of the pontoon. This allowed the dog to have his own point of entry that would not block the ladder for others. I threw the ball in and had my wife at the end of the ramp and the dog walked right down and stepped naturally into the water. I'm thrilled that the dog can now fully participate in swimming off the boat with the rest of the family!

Robert Cumbers

Robert Cumbers

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