Sailing with Franco is great fun but it does have it’s difficulties. Apart from taking up 3/4 of the family basket by lying starfished to maxium stretch at night while Lee and I fall out of bed, there are other things that have to be taken into account.

He has to have a passport (with optional photo of massive ears). The vets unfortunately lost his original one from Colombia but no biggy. So first off, find a good vet with excellent knowledge of the laws surrounding travelling with your beloved four legged furry friend. Your first stop should be the government website. It is all laid out there, but can be a bit of a worry to do it on your own in case you get it wrong, so I would definitely recommend a vet for this. They also do the passport, fill it in and ours has a sheet with an easy to read guide on it that we will get when we collect his new passport on Monday. Ours is also printing out his treatment and visit summary for us. Make sure you keep everything in a folder onboard.

The main thing is the Rabies vaccine, and this can take up to 4 months to sort out, so if you want to go with them, get planning sooner rather than later. We have also purchased a fancy collar that kills everything that comes in a 5 mile radius of him, but this will probably involve him being kept away from small children and the old and frail. He’s got prescribed medication from a sailing friendly vet for seasickness and potential anxiety for long trips, Drontal, Nexguard, his own first aid kit…The list goes on!

We are currently enjoying a bit of a warmth in the UK, and due to our stupidity a while ago Franco became a very poorly boy. We were at anchor and he was in and out of the water, swimming, playing and having a good old woof when over the course of a few hours he became lethargic. Despite us carefully managing his walks so he didn’t have too much sun, this decline was very quick and very scary. As this is so unlike him we were instantly worried, and found a mobile vet. We spoke to them on the phone but as we were in a very inaccessible area had to give them the co ordinates from an ordnance survey map. Bless him he came within 30 minutes and treated Sausage. It took about 24 hours until he was back to his old self. He had water ingress from playing in the sea and shouting. This led to him feeling sick and then very quickly dehydration. The vet showed us how too administer fluids to him if this happened again, but we all learned a very valuable and nearly tragic lesson. Dogs need their owners to manage their behaviour carefully, and to be the intelligent ones when it is hot. I don’t think any dog would have died from missing a play but ours could have died from one too many.

With the current high temperatures Franco seems to have naturally slowed down. This means his longer walks and plays are early morning and later in the evenings, with shorter walks in the day. He has fans, a cooling jacket and cooler mats to help him, and we have also purchased and fitted blackout blinds and made blackout covers for the large saloon windows. His jacket seems to work wonders and I have to say I am pretty chuffed with it. Is is called the Cool Dogs Cooling Coat and you dunk it in cold water for 2 minutes, wring it out and put it on. It feels like chamois cloth when wrung out so nice and soft. This isn’t a hard sell advertising blog, it’s just a good bit of kit and cost us around £30 from Amazon.

The other doggy issue is peeing and pooping on the boat. Franco has only done this once when we were in rough weather and put him down below for his own safety (or so we thought). He did a dirty protest across the whole saloon which after the journey we had was a true delight to clean up at 0200! We have tried everything to get him to do his business on the boat, but so far nothing. He seems to be related to camels and we have (ahem) peed into jugs and deposited this around the boat, put his lead on and taken him for walks around the boat, had another dog pee on the boat, bought astroturf and then added a gnome to this for him to aim at but nothing. I have been told that when he has to he will go, so am very much hoping so else he will be an uncomfortable boy in a couple of weeks time when we head down to the Canaries.

So that’s it for now, and I will keep you updated on the pee progress if that’s what floats your boat.