About Our Dogs 

  Our dogs come from the Sakonnet PWDs kennel of Mimi & John Karlsson in Hope Valley, Rhode Island.  We have three Sakonnet dogs, two of whom form the basis of our small kennel (Asta and Beleza).  Our dogs compete in a variety of performance sports including Obedience (AKC and CDSP), Rally, Agility (AKC and NADAC), Barn Hunt, Canine Nosework (AKC and NACSW), Water, and Tracking.  All of our older dogs have earned their Canine Good Citizen certificates and all have earned several levels of tricks titles.  We also have one Border Collie who, in addition to the above sports, is learning Herding.   In 2018-2019, Kari earned 4th place in the PWDCA Owner Handler program for Performance Venues and 9th place in All Venues Combined, a testament to her working with all of her Portuguese Water Dogs.

We tend to start retiring our dogs around age 10 to ensure that they do not incur muscle injuries from strenous activities like agility.  Nevertheless, they still compete and/or train in other fun, but less hard-on-the-body activities for as long as possible.  Within the last year (2018-2019), Darwin earned his CDX obedience title, his water WWDX certificate, four scentwork titles, and his tracking dog title, and thus has earned a MAC-4 (Multiple Achievement Award from the PWDCA), a Gold Register of Merit (from the PWDCA), and a VCD1 and VCD2 from the AKC; Asta earned her ACT1 agility title and was awarded a MAC-2; Bell earned her AWD and WWD water titles and WWDX certificate, her Rally Novice, Intermediate and Advanced titles, her Tricks Advanced title, her ACT 1&2 and Novice Agility and Novice Fast Agility titles, her NADAC TN-N and NJC agility titles, and was awarded a MAC-1 and MAC-2.  Uta earned her Novice Obedience (CD) title, her ACT 1&2 agility title, her Tricks Advanced title, as well as her Rally Novice, Intemediate, Advanced, and Excellent titles, and qualified for the AKC Invitational Nationals in Rally with her high scores.

Our yearling, Red Scully, earned her Novice Tricks title at the end of August 2018 (4 mos old) and her Intermediate Tricks title at just a year of age, and just got her first qualifying run in ACT agility; she shows great promise for training in agility and has started training for competition obedience, tracking, and water.

​To learn more about each dog, click on that dog's collage.