During our stay in the USA we also visited St. Michaels, a town on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Within the last years they built a museum of the history of the bay with an enormous and lovely work.

One table in the museum is admired to the Chesapeake Bay Retrievern and describes e.g. their incomparability with other water-hunting dogs. You have to keep in mind: 150 years ago the Chesapeake Bay was a tough place to be. People needed dogs that were able to sit in a boat for hours, seek the shot water birds for hours at all temperature and even guard the house, hunt in field with thorns and pulling the sledge in the winter time. Their skin won’t let them freeze in the winter and protect them against thorns and water. People say about the skin of a Chessi that it is like a duck: no water gets in.

Here you see me in the museum touching a predecessor of the Chessies on the head. A big, black dog with white breast and feet similar to a New-Fundland-dog. Now we know, where some white spots on some CHessies some from.

View on a seidearm of the Chesapeake Bay.