It would be fair to say Fergus has a nose for (golf) balls: The six-year-old Golden Labrador has sniffed out a staggering 3,986 at the Cromwell Golf Club since March 2020.

As a lockdown distraction, owner Doug Harradine took him down to the golf course and within days, Fergus was nose-down, tail-up, on the job, finding balls lost in the rough.

Fortunately for players, he’s not interested in golf balls in the open – they must be hidden from sight to get him excited.

Doug knows about a dozen of the club members' particular way of marking their golf balls and he returns them when he can.  

A keen golfer himself, Doug managed the club from 1995 to 2008 and has a laugh when members call and ask for Fergus to sniff out a (usually expensive) ball that missed the green.

“He has about a 90 per cent hit rate,” Doug said. 

Best ball boy

Doug gives quite a few back to the club, and recently gifted around 250 to the women’s introductory golf clinic.

It’s OK, I’ve found it

Fergus isn’t the first good dog that’s been involved with the club.  

Sailor, a large black Cocker Spaniel, helped finance the club in the early 1950s. He belonged to Ken Munro, an avid golfer, who was born at Grumbling Gully near Tarras in 1878, and retired to Cromwell in 1950.

It was a unique and profitable working arrangement between the club and the spaniel who could sniff out a Spalding, Topflite or Dunlop at a hundred paces.

Golf balls were expensive after the war due to a rubber shortage (balls were made with rubber inners at that time). Anyone who lost one was quick to get Sailor working and paid the club a ‘search fee’ of one shilling per ball.

Sailor’s passing was noted in the club’s minutes of the 1956/57 AGM

In one financial year, Sailor’s finder’s fee paid the club 20 pounds and 15 shillings. He has been immortalised with the 13th hole bearing his name.

Whether Fergus has such aspirations is unknown, but any way you slice it, Fergus is a very good dog.