This hero dog is starting a new job -- and a diet

Editor’s note: We caught up with the most interesting people — and animals — we wrote about in 2018. Learn what’s new with each this week.

Good ol’ Woody is about to start a new job. Well, sort of.

Of course you remember him, the lifesaving Labrador retriever who, in March, dove from a dock to save a man drowning in the chilly, wind-driven waters of the Okatie River.

First responders called it miraculous. Mason Ringer, the struggling swimmer, promised the pooch a steak. Garden & Gun magazine said Woody was a very good dog.

And he’s continued to be one during the past eight months.

“He’s still looking for swimmers,” owner Susan Atkinson recently joked.

Her son, William, has started a new job as a real estate developer in Savannah and will be taking Woody to work with him some days, she said. It’ll be a reunion of sorts: Woody would sometimes accompany William to class at the University of Georgia, and to the occasional Athens watering hole.

Meanwhile, Woody continues to enjoy trips to the Atkinsons’ land in Okatie, where he nags the horses and chases a stray cat the family feeds.

He also comforted a neighbor, recently widowed, who broke down crying one day — Woody wouldn’t leave her side.

He’s in good health after some “cosmetic surgery” to remove a wart on his head and a benign, fatty tumor on his chest.

Ringer followed through on his offer of a steak, Atkinson said, but Woody had to politely decline.

The bologna-loving lab is currently on a diet.