‘What a girl!’: Brave adventure dog Amber swims to island after solo 100-mile journey, finds a loving owner

Some dogs are built differently. Amber the retriever cross was facing a hard life on the burning hot streets of Qatar, but was rescued by KS Angels Rescue, a charity that rehomes stray dogs in the United Kingdom. For most dogs, this would be a dream ticket to a happy life, and Amber was temporarily placed in a foster home within England’s verdant New Forest.

But after just a single night with foster owner Jess Wadsworth, Amber heard the call of adventure. After somehow leaping over an 8-foot-high deer fence, she explored large parts of the United Kingdom and even swam from the mainland to an offshore island.

Amber’s incredible journey was chronicled in an article in The Guardian, which details the intense campaign to track her down. Over the 36 days she was missing, she was frequently spotted in the New Forest, but evaded food stations and cameras and eventually made a break for the coast. Faced with the open ocean, she dove in, doggy paddling for a mile until she reached the isolated and small Brownsea Island.

AMBER HOME SAFE. THANKS FOR RT's 😊🐕🐾

🆘25 APR 2025 #Lost AMBER #ScanMe
Golden/ White Saluki Female #Bramshaw #Lyndhurst #Hampshire #SO43
Amber was in her first night in a foster home after arriving from Qatar. https://t.co/FK04ybHrBo pic.twitter.com/j2BXTc967O

— chris towers (@millypod1) June 1, 2025

They thought she was a seal

A baffled islander was shocked to see a stray dog on the tiny island, but began leaving food out for her. Finally, Amber decided to head back to the mainland, being spotted in the sea by a ferry crew who initially assumed she was a seal. One of the crew, Ethan Grant, said: “I then realised it was a dog and thought ‘what’s that doing out there?’ You could see she was struggling so we thought we need to get her out otherwise she wouldn’t have made it.”

Thankfully, the tired, shivering, and doubtless hungry Amber was indeed fished out of the water, taken to a vet, and declared skinny but healthy. Amber was returned to her foster family, with Wadsworth impressed by her tenacity: “She’s already in really good nick compared to how long she had gone for. What a girl!”

Wadsworth is only providing a foster home, but it’s sounding like Amber is going to have a happy ending. The island resident who cared for Amber after she swam there has been in touch, saying she’d love to be her new permanent owner. But, uh, maybe keep an eye on her when you’re walking her on the beach unless she gets another bad case of doggie wanderlust and decides to plunge into the ocean in search of new adventures!