Coastal Dog Walkers
Professional dog walking in North Shields, Tynemouth and Cullercoats.
Living on the coast we get all kinds of weather. Today we walked the whole length of the promenade between North Shields Fish Quay and Tynemouth and didn't encounter another soul on the whole of that part of the walk.
To say it was a grim day would be an understatement but no matter how bad the weather looks before you go out of the house it never seems as bad when you're out and about (40 days and 40 nights of biblical weather will follow this post as I have clearly jinxed the weather for the foreseeable future)....but if the dogs don't mind, I don't mind. As long as i'm wrapped up it's pretty easy to stay comfortable, if anything i always end up getting too warm. Not sure what Mae thought of our walk today though...
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I have been on the lookout for a second pair of hands to help me out for some time now and I am pleased to report I have found someone and the bonus is that I have known him for years, he's a recently retired chap who I have worked with in the past and is also a parent at our respective kids's school. I am really chuffed as he's not expecting a full time job which is great as some weeks i only need him to take up the excess on a couple of walks and some weeks I won't need him at all. What it does mean is I can continue to take on new dogs and not end up in this situation... So that gets me off to a great start in 2016. I've had John out with me and he's done a few walks on his own too and being a dog owner himself (2 Spaniels) he's used to a lot of the situations that will come his way. All the dogs have taken to him and all of the owners are happy to have John on board too. Everyone, it seems is a winner!
So you need a professional dog walker. You've looked around and settled on a couple of possibilities, hopefully Coastal Dog Walkers are on your shortlist! We are now in our 6th year and would love for you to be our next customer.
I'm sure you have lots of questions for us which I'll happily answer but let me ask you a couple of things first as we need these questions answered before we can progress. 1/ where do you live? 2/ is your dog friendly with other dogs? 3/ is your dog good on the lead? Unlike most other dog walkers the area we cover is relatively small (North Shields, Tynemouth and Cullercoats). Transport is necessary to do the job but we do our best to be on foot as much as possible so if you live too far away you might not make it it to question 2. Question 2 is a no brainier. For the sake of everyone's safety (current pack, us and your dog) we prefer to take on well natured dogs, that's not to say we won't give your dog a chance if he/she is a little bit grumpy. We have found that grumpy dogs can settle pretty quickly once they have been allowed to socialise and find their place in the pack. Question 3 is there for us to be able to begin to assess if a new dog if going to be tricky to handle. If a dog is really, really bad on the lead we can quickly get ourselves into a situation where 75% of our attention is on that one dog and the other dogs in the pack don't get the time they deserve. We aren't looking for the perfect dog, just one that is good enough on the lead, friendly enough and lives within our zone. So there you have it, if all that sounds ok feel free to get in touch if you are looking for a North Shields dog walker (or Tynemouth / Cullercoats). John Coastal Dog Walkers 07725041572 I started my dog walking business in January of this year and after 9 months or so of steady growth I have concluded that, for me a smaller, more compact dog walking 'round' is better. Initially I found it oh-so-easy to say yes to any and every enquiry that came my way but often this took me miles away from home and meant I was spending way too much time driving, picking up dogs, driving some more and collecting more dogs before eventually starting my walk then doing the doggy drop offs once done.
A few months back I lost a couple of temporary customers who only needed me for a short while and also at the same time I stopped walking a badly behaved dog; lastly I was put in the awkward position of chasing a couple of customers for monies owed leading to more lost dogs. Initially this felt like a bit of a blow but it all turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the majority of these customers were quite some distance from my home and this left me with a core set of customers quite close by. Suddenly my routine changed and I found I was spending virtually no time in the car and at all and I was actually able to complete my round without the need for a vehicle at all. So I have decided to be very strict with my dog walking 'zone'. Yes, my customer base will grow slower but I have enough customers right now and if I get a new enquiry and they live in my revised 'zone' I'll happily take them on but if they live outside of the zone then i'll have to pass it on to one of the other dog walkers out there. (I have finally made some contacts with other dog walkers via a very friendly Facebook Page). I think my new 'no car' way of doing the round means the dogs are stimulated from the get-go (no time spent bored in the back of the car) and I don't have the worries that I know other dog walkers have about their vans breaking down, mechanical bills and time off the road. Like a lot of families myself and my wife both work. Between us we do all sorts of stuff to keep the wolf from the door and from time to time I find that I have my boy Albie with me on the occasional dog walk. I have 2 boys and Albie is the youngest of them (older brother, Jesse is 15 and therefore more than capable of doing his own thing). Albie is only 11 and if there's no one to take him during half terms (I don't work walk dogs at the weekend) he tags along with me. Fortunately he's just mad on dogs and the dogs in the pack all love him to bits. I was initially a little concerned about taking Albie with me (what would my customers think? Was it fair on him? Would he be bored?). As it turns out my customers appreciate him being there as it's another person for the dogs to get used to, trust and interact with. I enjoy him being there because it's something for just me and him and the dogs really enjoy it too so although I always try and make sure he's able to be with someone else when I'm on a walk it's just not always possible. The summer hols is a toughie but from the 8 weeks his school close down for he's only been out with me maybe 5 or 6 times so all in all that's not too bad!
I also took Lewis and Islay into Tynemouth and we spent some time in the Castle Moat before heading up through the village on our way home. These two love being out and about no matter what the weather!
Flash is a Staffy and having never owned or walked a Staffy I have to confess I was unsure if I should even take Flash on. Everything I thought I knew about the breed I had seen on the news or read in the paper and I have to confess to being a little nervous but upon meeting him I immediately fell in love with him. He's a really brilliant, loving and intelligent dog and I know I say this about all of my dogs but he really is one of my favourites! He's 5 years old and has spent 3 of those years in the cat and dog shelter. If you've ever been to a cat and dog shelter you'll know that most of the dogs there are Staffy's and are, for the most part overlooked by potential owners but his current owner didn't overlook Flash and they've been together since November last year.
Here's a few pics of Flash from recent walks. He walks pretty well on the lead and responds very well to basic commands such as sit and stay, he gets on very well with the rest of the pack and yesterday I let him off the lead for the first time and his recall was excellent. I had him out today to Marden Quarry, which he seemed to enjoy and I'm looking forward to seeing him again on Thursday when I have him next. I was asked by Mae's owner to take Mae swimming earlier this week as I now offer a 'Wet Dog' day session which is a 2 hour one to one activity of walking and swimming which allows the dog 45 minutes to an hour in the sea. I do a bit of outdoor swimming myself so with the knowledge I have and some good advice from more experienced sea swimmers I took Mae onto Longsands beach for a dip on Tuesday this week. I was happy that I had done my research on the best place to get into the sea, the conditions were good and I felt fully prepared for the session. After donning my wetsuit and trooping down to a spot about 20 yards from the waters edge I made a neat little pile of things I didn't want to take into the water such as a couple of towels, some fresh drinking water, my flip flops etc. For reasons I am still unsure of I then decided to bury my keys in the sand. I bagged them up and concealed them in the sand beneath my flip flops... It turned out that Mae really didn't like getting in the water. I did get her swimming a couple of times but all the signals were that she just wasn't enjoying it so after about half an hour of coaxing and trying to tempt her in just a little bit deeper I made a decision to use the rest of the session playing in and near the surf to give her an enjoyable experience of the water, albeit not quite what I had originally planned but I felt it was for the best. We had a great time and come 5.30pm it was time to end the session and head back home so we both got dried off, had a quick drink and grabbing my stuff we headed off up the beach. We had gone no further than 30 seconds up the beach when I realised, with some horror that my keys were still buried in the sand! I beleive I may have exclaimed 'flip' at the point it dawned on me just what I'd done. We retraced our steps as best we could to where we had been but other than many paw prints there was nothing. Nothing at all to give us a clue as to where we had placed our belongings over my keys. We'd been on the beach for about an hour and a half and in that time the light had changed, the sea was coming in and other than a rough idea as to where we'd been I really couldn't be certain with any degree of accuracy. I knew they were 'somewhere' in the vicinity of where I was now standing, gormlessly looking around, but really they could have been anywhere in a 10 metre radius of where I was. And the tide was coming in. I had to get Mae home as I said we'd be back for 6pm so I spent the next 15 minutes randomly digging at the sand. Mae cottoned on and also got stuck in but after 15 minutes of randomly scattering sand about we had to go. Fortunately my wife had turned up by this point and she had spare keys on her so we temporarily decamped, offloaded Mae and I went home as I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: I would search for the keys with a garden rake. The keys were only about 1 inch below the surface of the sand and i had wrapped them in a plastic bag so i figured the rake would have a good chance of finding them and I could cover a lot of ground very quickly. Wrong. See Pic below. With the tide edging ever closer to the area where I thought the keys might be I desperately needed another plan. Digging randomly was just relying on blind luck, the rake was an immediate and epic fail and I was fast running out of time...
Earlier my wife had rescued me with the spare keys and now she came to my rescue again as she's put a shout out on facebook for a metal detector. I left the beach for the 3rd time and returned again about 20 minutes later with a metal detector which I had picked up from a gentleman in Cullercoats. Much to my horror the sea had now consumed much of the area I had previously been digging at so by the time i started to sweep the area with the metal detector my heart really wasn't in it but I figured I'd come this far so I might as well crack on. I worked quickly over the sand, starting as close to the water as I could and sweeping back and forth along the shore I worked my way back up the beach. The machine kept bleeping at me almost constantly but there was just nothing beneath the surface so I had to ignore what I thought might be false positives and after a bit, much to my amazement the thing bleeped in a slightly different way and when I scratched the sand away my keys were there waiting where i'd buried them! The people on the beach must of thought I was a bit of a mentalist because I very very jubilant at the point I found them. The family who were enjoying a nice time at the beach near to where I was had seen me in the water with the dog, seen me leave the beach and return with the worlds worst garden rake, seen me leave again only to return yet again with a metal detector and finally seen me whooping and hopping around with delight as I found my keys. As I walked past them for the final time to exit the beach they pretty much all looked at me like I was a lunatic. It's been a little while since I wrote a blog about any of my dogs so I thought i'd focus a little on Mae. She is a Border Collie and has been with me for a couple of months now, She is almost 1 year old and is incredibly loving and just a pleasure to be with...she's always really happy to see me when I collect he and she loves to give me a cuddle when I first go in to pick her up. She's pretty good on the lead for such a young dog but does sometimes try to 'herd' me and the other dogs by going into sheepdog mode and running round the back of us but overall her lead work is good.
Maes favourite thing in the whole wide world is watching old episodes of The Love Boat.....not really i'm just in a silly mood. Maes favourite thing is a tennis ball. She's reluctant to give it up though and if i'm overly keen to get it from her she wanders off with it. The trick is to show no interest and after a little while she drops it near your feet so you can throw it again. I have noticed that there are a number of dog walking businesses around who have very visible branding on their vehicles. After giving some though to this I have decided against putting any advertising on my vehicle...the simple reason is this:
If i were using a regular Dog Walker then I wouldn't want to advertise the fact that I'm not at home by virtue of the fact that a very visible Dog Walking Van keeps pitching up at my front door at regular times of the week. I am sure that this extra visibility is great for business but I have taken the view that i'd rather get a few less enquiries than alert 'perps' to the fact you aren't home. |
Coastal Dog WalkersWelcome to the occasional ramblings of a North Shields dog walker. Archives
February 2022
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