When Chris De Aboitiz informally launches his revolutionary Pack Mates training concept at the Noosa Festival of Surfing this weekend, it will be the culmination of a lifetime of learning how to think and speak dog.
It all began in his birthplace of Sydney nearly 60 years ago when Chris was a toddler and the family got a Dalmatian puppy they called Bambi.
The name – that’s all he can remember of his first dog, but he’s been paying back the canine family ever since, forming incredibly strong bonds with a succession of much-loved packs.
The De Aboitiz family moved around the world a lot when Chris and his sisters were young, their dad Alejandro working as an engineer for the Pepsi Cola corporation, from Sydney to Hawaii to Argentina, then Spain and Puerto Rico before moving back to Hawaii as Chris hit his teens. In Argentina they had a German Shepherd, in Puerto Rico another Dalmatian, who was put into quarantine so she could travel back to Hawaii with the family, where they got another one and bred a litter.
It was during those years in Hawaii that Chris fell in love with the fundamentals of his life – dogs and surf. As a boy who moved schools a lot, he was often a newbie who copped the brunt of kiddie cruelty. He recalls: “I think I always had a way with dogs, but in Hawaii, sometimes you had to stand and fight, and that was when I started to think like a dog. I watched our dogs and began to understand the pecking order, and that really came home to me later.”
Chris’s love of the ocean had manifested itself wherever the family lived, but in Waikiki he started working as a surf instructor with the legendary Hawaiian big wave surfer and beach boy Clyde Aikau, who taught him everything from switching feet on a wave to making banana leaf hats under the shade of the banyans. By the time he reached Noosa in the late 1980s with Hawaiian-born partner Lori, he was not only an exceptional all-round waterman, with board and boat skills, he had also developed into a young entrepreneur with street-smart savvy and determination in equal measure.
When I first met him in 1990 he was selling a 1973 white Mercedes Benz by the side of Noosa Parade, and I bought it for my wife. It turned out to be a lemon, but you could never hold a grudge against Chris and we became firm friends.
Soon after arriving in Noosa, Chris and Lori had bought a Golden Retriever they called Kekai who was soon accompanying Chris to his work on the river boats. She’d spend all day hanging on the bow of a ski boat, then join the crew on the jetty at beer o’clock. “After a while she never wanted to come home with me. She became the jetty dog, and she’d go home with whichever member of the gang would take her. And Kekai also inadvertently became the world’s first dog surfer.
Around this time the Noosa festival of Surfing had introduced a Hawaiian-style opening ceremony and paddle out. Chris, who would go on to become the world tandem surfing champion in Noosa a few years later, would grab his 12-foot tandem board and paddle out with Kekai perched on the nose of the board, just like she did on the bow of the ski boat. Chris would catch a wave or two on the way in, much to Kekai’s delight. Surfing with your dog caught on, with varying degrees of success, but Kekai was getting too old for it. In 2000 Chris celebrated the new century by getting Lani, who would become the first leader of his pack.
During the ‘90s, Chris had cashed in on the longboard revival by establishing Noosa Longboards, still on Hastings Street today, but in the 2000s he saw the beginnings of the stand-up paddle boom, and guess what? SUPs, as they are known, were perfect for dog surfing.
The Noosa surf festival introduced a SUP division, and within a few years and a couple of Chris-led demonstrations, this grew to include a dog-surfing event. The first time the VetShopAustralia Surfing Dogs Championships were held, they attracted a sizeable crowd of curious onlookers. The following year thousands packed the beach to watch. The former world champions who were in the previous heat were stunned to learn that the crowd was there to watch the dogs, not them!
The 2000s also proved that in Chris’s case the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Son Keahi, by then a young teen, was turning into a champion waterman with a particular focus on kite-surfing. With four world titles under his belt, Keahi now lives in Hawaii with his partner. Says Chris: “I’m very proud of his success in the water, but what’s most important to me is the way he conducts himself in and out of the water, always kind and respectful.”
In 2010 Chris’s interest in understanding dog behaviour – speaking dog, as he called it – was piqued by meeting Cesar Millan, the Mexican-American trainer who had become the world’s most famous “dog whisperer” through a cable TV show. While Chris had his own philosophy of dog relationships, developed over decades, he learnt a lot from Cesar, and became determined to put his own ideas into practice, as Cesar had. For this he needed space, so in 2012 he sold up in Noosa and bought a 40-acre mountain estate on the edge of the surf town of Agnes Water, on the Discovery Coast between Bundaberg and Gladstone.
While he kept up the cash flow running his own stand up paddle board hire and lessons at nearby 1770, for almost a decade Chris has poured most of his energy and resources into creating The Summit 1770, a pet-friendly, multi-tiered holiday park in an exquisite setting, offering a broad range of accommodation options, from powered and unpowered campsites to smart cabins to a luxurious family villa and pool with 360-degree views from mountains to sea. The Summit, which earlier this year joined the prestigious Kui Parks national network, also offers a variety of dog training and activity options, including the twice-weekly “dog runs” in which owners can socialise over sundowners while their dogs run free around a beautiful billabong, and now a Sunday workshop and demonstration open to the public.
According to Chris, this is just the start. And that’s where Pack Mates come in. He says: “There’s continuity in the relationship I have with my pack, which is now in its third generation, from Lani’s leadership to Rama’s now and soon it will be Jarrah. And through developing and maintaining those relationships, there is so much I’ve learnt and can pass on. That’s what we’re going to do at The Summit, home of the Pack Mates, when the Pack goes on tour to other pet-friendly campgrounds and holiday parks, and with our recorded workshops online.”
It’s a big vision and a big project, but that’s never daunted Chris.
Chris De Aboitiz will be presenting a short introduction to the Pack Mates concept and a sit/stay on a surfboard demonstration at First Point Noosa on Saturday afternoon at 1.30pm, ahead of the VetShopAustralia Surfing Dogs. For more information on this event call VetShopAustralia on 1300 838 746.
Chris will also be demonstrating his techniques for Central Queensland dog lovers at the Agnes Water Longboard Classic on Sunday 24 March, with a sit/stay/surf demonstration at 11.30am ahead of a dog surf exhibition at 12pm. For more information visit thesummit1770.com.au
