Last Weekend, Lake Zoar Went To The Dogs

By Jeff White

While her cohort yelped and howled on the bow of a neighboring boat, Robin, a shinny golden retriever, hung her front legs over a gunnel and sniffed the air above Lake Zoar’s water. Her body turned rigid all at once, and she had a scent locked. A second later, she spilled over the bow and kicked toward an invisible target.

Moments later, a Newtown Underwater Search & Rescue (NUSAR) diver emerged from the depths of the murky water.

The 10 dogs that padded along Zoar’s shores and plied its waters last weekend belonged to Connecticut Canine Search and Rescue (CCSR), a West Hartford-based volunteer organization. The group was in town to conduct one of its regular training sessions, which it holds two times every month in towns throughout the state.

NUSAR hosted CCSR last weekend, and gave the organization use of its boats along with NUSAR divers who played the role of drowning victims. Working with area search and rescue teams is very important to CCSR, explained longtime member Kathy Queen. The organization responds to calls for land and water searches, and supplements the manpower of groups like NUSAR with the considerable recovery capability of its border collies, rottweilers, Newfoundlands, and retrievers.  

“It helps to train together, because dive teams need to know how the dogs work, and dog handlers need to know how the dive teams work,” Ms Queen said. “It helps to have that familiarity, because you work better with the people you know and trust. We’re talking about a real situation at 2 am. Are you going to go out on a boat on a dark night with someone you’ve never met before? I’m not.”

For both the dogs and their handlers, it was a chance to hone their search and rescue techniques. If a search is being conducted on land, dogs have relatively free reign as to how they find a missing person. They can take off from their handlers and roam over a large area.

On water, searching becomes a little more difficult.

“The hardest part of the whole [training] process is teaching them to tell us reliably when they find things,” Ms Queen explained. With aquatic searches, dogs do not have the luxury to just bolt away from their handlers. They have to rely almost solely on locking onto the scent of a submerged victim, and staying with that scent as the wind shifts.

For their part, a handler learns to read his or her dog’s signals. It might be a drawn-out yelp, or a fixed stare at a particular spot in a body of water. Sometimes, rescuers can draw a dotted line from where the dog is staring to where a victim is recovered.

Other dogs might not make a sound at all, unless they feel the boat is moving away from the “scent cone,” the column of air given off by a victim that pierces through and hovers above the water’s surface.

Most dogs on CCSR’s roster cannot jump out of the boat and swim to a victim; only Robin, the retriever, can. Once she has a lock on a submerged victim, she will paddle out until she is just treading water above the victim’s location.

“You have to learn to read the dog. Probably the hardest part of any search and rescue training for dog handlers is that you must learn to trust the dog,” Ms Queen explained. “The dog is almost always right.”

On board the NUSAR boat, Joanne Pigott, a Kennsington native, gave Robin a reward for a good find, a way of reinforcing good habits and effective technique.

The trust that many CCSR handlers have established with their dogs was not easy to come by. It took 18 months to train each CCSR dog, and another two years or more to train the handlers.

Last weekend, CCSR had some training help from two North Carolina dog experts. Jonni Joyce and Nancy Hook were both on hand to assist CCSR handlers and NUSAR in their practice drills. Both women conduct dog search and rescue training seminars nationally, and first met CCSR members at one such seminar in Massachusetts earlier this year.

“We’ve been doing water searches for a long time, but this is just new information and practice,” Ms Queen said of the extra help from North Carolina.

Each year, CCSR goes out on about 16 calls, but with nine emergency calls already received this year, Ms Queen predicts this summer will be busier than average.

“Many dive teams now call us directly, and if they have not turned [the person] up by the time we get there, then we to go at it,” she said.

CCSR was incorporated in 1994, and is comprised of 19 members, all of whom have extensive years of experience working with dogs. Ms Queen said that she alone has been training dogs for 35 years.

Although much of CCSR’s dog training occurs in the wilderness, when the group has a chance to practice on water, Ms Queen said members see it as a training bonus. Practice on water makes CCSR’s recovery skills more complete.

“We never know where people are going to get lost,” Ms Queen explained. “We have to do all different kinds of training in order to be able to find them when the situation arises. We do nights, we do rotten weather, in different kinds of scenarios. Sometimes it will be river work, sometimes it will be on lakes and streams.”