Shelley has never liked my parents' pool -- now this is a story that's going to sound funny, but I tell it for what it's worth.
I worked at an agility trial one time when they were offering free lunch (and a free sweatshirt!) to everybody who worked. So then I had the $5 I had brought for lunch burning a hole in my pocket. There was a lady who had set up as a "Canine Communicator" a/k/a Doggie Psychic, so I plopped down my 5 bucks.
Among other things, she said that Shelley wasn't AFRAID of swimming pools but didn't like them because she fell into one as a puppy. I protested that she'd never been near a pool til she was almost 2 . . . and the lady said, "she's laughing at you."
It wasn't until much later that I remembered that when Shelley boarded with her first trainer as a puppy of about 3 months old, and her trainer told me when I picked her up that she and another Lab managed to unsnap the cover off the hot tub and get in. And that they were the first dogs who had ever managed to do that . . . . sneaky Labs!
She wouldn’t get in on her own at first. We kept teaching her how to get to the steps and now she will jump in and go towards me until I tell her to go to the steps. I do sometimes have to point her in the right direction. She still mostly likes to run up and down the pool barking while we swim but then will all of sudden just jump in. She always watches me and swims right for me.
I learned something else about her yesterday. I was just playing around with my daughter but Belle thought I was hurting her and she went ballistic. I had to calm her down and keep telling her I was only playing. She kept barking fiercely right at me as though she was telling me off. All I was doing was hugging my daughter and kissing her all over her face but the way my daughter squeals, Belle must have thought I was hurting her.