How to teach your dog to stand-up paddleboard — The Know

Except when Danny Frank and fiancée Jordan Dierks are at work, their dog Rio tags along pretty much wherever they go. Rio loves to go fly fishing with Frank, so much so that he calls her “The queen of the river.” Rio also will be in the wedding party when the couple is wed in October atop Lookout Mountain, walking down the aisle as the “dog of honor” with the best man.

“We hate leaving the dog at home,” said Frank, who owns a fly fishing guide service.

So when Frank and Dierks decided recently to take up stand-up paddleboarding as a new hobby, there was no question whether Rio would be joining them. Rio got her first taste of the sport last Sunday in the reservoir at Bear Creek Lake Park and proved to be a natural — the canine queen on her new aquatic throne.

“She was just so sweet,” said Dierks, who works for Jefferson County Human Services certifying foster families. “She was taking in every moment. Occasionally she would look back to make sure you’re still there, but she just loves being out in nature and taking it all in. You can see it in her eyes, her ears just going crazy. I could tell she was enjoying the moment, just like me.”

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Stand-up paddleboarders have proliferated on area lakes and reservoirs over the past five years or so, but an increasing number of them are bringing their fur babies with them.

“It’s a growing trend,” said Todd Taylor, park ranger and supervisor at Bear Creek Lake Park. “You’d be surprised, the majority of dogs have lifejackets, also.”

At Big Soda Lake — the other lake at Bear Creek Lake Park that allows stand-up paddleboarding — Westminster firefighter Shawn Caswell went paddling last week with Beryl, a mixed breed he picked up as a rescue pup on a trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands two years ago. They started paddleboarding together that summer.

“When we first started, I think he did it more on my behalf than his, but now he loves it,” Caswell said. “He loves to come out and get on the board and go swim. He’ll swim as long as I let him. I could take him out in the middle of the lake, he’d probably swim to shore if I let him, but I paddle the board up next to him after five or six minutes of swimming and he’ll climb back on. We’ll paddle around and hang out, and when he gets antsy and wants to get in (the water), he gets in.”

It’s not unusual for Bear Creek Lake Park to attract hundreds of paddleboards in a day. Watching the proliferation of board-riding pooches, Taylor has noticed the learning curve varies widely.

“Some dogs, they put the dog on the board and they’re good to go like they’ve done it 100 times,” Taylor said. “Others, they put them on, a lot of them naturally want to go back to shore because they’re on a boat surrounded by water. It’s something different that they’re not real comfortable with. Some do take a little training; it takes them a few times to break them in near shore, put the dog on, try to get them adjusted to it.

“A lot of times, it will be a husband and wife where one’s on shore, and the dog wants to go back to the person on shore. It takes a little training, but the majority of them get it. I guess they kind of enjoy it, too.”

They are dogs, after all, and dogs love water almost as much as they love fetching sticks. Frank doesn’t take Rio with him when he’s working as a fishing guide because he wants the client to have his full attention, but Rio loves to accompany him when he goes fishing on his off days.

“She’s been on the water since she was a real little girl,” Frank said. “I picked her up at eight weeks, and on the way back from picking her up we floated 20 miles in Wyoming in a boat. We cleared out the beer cooler so she could have a little spot to curl up.”

Frank and Dierks took up paddleboarding because it was something they could do together on metro lakes — they live five minutes from Bear Creek Lake Park — without the hassle of fighting Interstate 70 traffic. The two of them went Sunday night with a friend who fell off the board three times, much to the amusement of the others.

“It’s great that we could bring the dog along,” Frank said. “We hate leaving the dog at home. She could sit on the shore with us, but she had a lot more fun jumping on the paddleboard and going out there. We all wanted turns with her.”

There is one unfortunate byproduct of dogs in parks, but Taylor said it hasn’t been a problem so far in Bear Creek Lake Park.

“I’ve never seen a dog defecate on a board, or kind of in the water,” Taylor said. “That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, but I’ve never seen that. I would think they would rather go to a more comfortable area, back on land.”

Caswell has some advice for introducing dogs to the sport.

“Let the dog acclimate at their own pace is the key,” Caswell said. “Last week we were out here and there was a gal, her kids and her brought one of their dogs out. The dog was real uncertain about it, didn’t like the life jacket being put on him, kind of put his tail between his legs. We talked and I helped her out. I took Beryl out into the water with their dog and that helped a lot, then put him on the paddleboard. It’s like people, with human nature, if they see somebody else doing it, they’re like, ‘That looks cool.’ The dog saw it and kind of repeated the behavior.

“Don’t force them. It’s like when someone is young, if you force them to eat their peas, they’re never going to like peas, so let them figure it out on their own. Eventually they become accustomed to it and seem to really enjoy it.”

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