Dog with intermittent recall

[FiveHoursSleep]

I'm a fairly experienced dog owner ( have had 8 dogs of my own ) and have always been able to train my dogs to recall.
Even our lurcher would come back unless she was chasing something.
We've had our newest dog ( Husky/Lab) for a year now, and, he was excellent for the first 9 months, but for the last three months he's started buggering off when it suits him. He's not even chasing stuff, just going where his nose takes him, then coming back to check i'm still there but running off when I approach him.
Then after a while you can see him decide to come back and he just approaches me for a pat and a treat. Often other people can catch him for me, and then he comes back to me as good as gold, no pulling away or trying to escape!
He's excellent at recall in our training class ( out in the park) and is doing well in agility ( not competing yet but maybe next year).
Sometimes he does the same for the dog walker- maybe 20-30% of the walks but can go for weeks without being a problem, then suddenly he has the wild in his eyes again. He does always come back eventually but his record is 3 hours of freedom!
We've also tried the whistle, he's fantastic at responding to this at home but when he goes feral he takes no notice of it.
My other dog comes back fine, but this dog isn't influenced by what the other one is doing. They play together quite a lot when running free but our newer one is quite happy going off on his own once our older one is on his lead.
We don't know his history but he was an Irish poundie, and seemed to have never been in a house when he came to the UK. He was a young adult when we got him, but acts like a puppy still.
We have some areas to walk him that are secure if he does decide to not come back, so the plan is to leash him everywhere else and keep working on his recall in training and agility.
Has anyone else had a dog with a dodgy recall that they have managed to correct?
Is it a matter of training and more training?
Or is he never likely to be reliable given that he's somewhere between 2-3 years old.

[Rubberduckies]

Thanks for updating, glad to hear it's helping!

[takeaturn]

Great thread. Really appreciate people's tips!

[FiveHoursSleep]

I just wanted to come back to this thread 3 1/2 weeks later and tell people about what a change I have seen in our younger dog using the advice given above.
He now stays relatively close to me on our walks and I reward him for every 2-3rd recall. He does disappear but it's usually for a few minutes, rather than for a couple of hours. I've only had him abscond once and then I just kept walking away and feeding our other dog for sitting until he sidled up to me and sat for a treat.
I've only been walking in in places where he doesn't run away, but in a week or two I'm going to take him to the place that has cause problems before and see what happens. Wish me luck!

[Rubberduckies]

Great! It's always good to have good news stories on here where things have actually worked! If you anticipate a problem in his naughty place can you stick a long line on him or make sure he's hungry when you go out and you have great food?

[Rubberduckies]

Also, well done. It was you that's done all the work and you must have been consistently working really hard to change his behaviour. (have a gold star!)

[Whitney168]

Sensible owners never let huskies off the lead, finding other ways to exercise them that wear them out and make use of their genetic urge to run straight and keep going.

There will be people who say 'oh, I do' and do so with no issues for years. Others say the same until the day their huskies hightails it in to the sunset, at which point you just hope they're caught before they're injured/killed.

It may well be that the husky element is the strongest in your dog, and he will never be safe off the lead. The wonders of cross-breeds, you never know which bit will 'win'.