About Marshlight Labradors

We live on a tidal creek on Lady's Island, across the bridge from downtown Beaufort, in a raised cottage with a dock that floods at the top of a king tide. Nell grew up here with a black Lab named Gus who rode in the bow of her father's johnboat. Wyatt married into the marsh and the dogs at the same time.

Our first Labrador of our own, a yellow girl named Glass, came to us in 2009 from a breeder who showed her dogs and hunted them too. That is still the kind of Labrador we care about: the classic English type, with a broad head, a thick otter tail, a real double coat and a temperament steady enough to lie under a restaurant table. Glass had our first litter in 2011. Fifteen years on, most of the dogs in the house are her great-grandchildren.

We breed one or two litters a year, and some years none. The dogs live in the house with us and swim most days on the incoming tide, when the water is clean and the oyster beds are covered. Puppies are whelped in a quiet room off the back porch and spend their last weeks with us on the porch itself, where they can hear the boat traffic, the rain on a tin roof and the neighbor's leaf blower.

Every dog we breed has OFA hips and elbows, a yearly eye exam, a cardiac echo, and DNA results for EIC, CNM, PRA-prcd, HNPK and the dilute gene. All of our dogs are D/D, which means they do not carry dilute and cannot produce it. We publish the color genetics of every pairing before the litter is born, so you will know what is possible and what is not.

We are members of The Labrador Retriever Club, and we show in AKC conformation when the calendar allows. Mostly, though, our dogs are what Labradors were bred to be: easy company in the house and hard to keep out of the water.