On Thursday, August 2, a change in race schedule plans meant that Ethan suddenly found himself with no bike races for the weekend. Since we now had no family plans, I checked the DockDogs website and found a competition in Osage Beach, MO. I wanted to learn more about dockdiving and see an actual competition, so on Friday morning Marian and I decided to make a last minute mini-vacation of it. We brought both Blast and Sunny. We left with the thought that Blast might have a chance to see a competition dock, experience the atmosphere of a dockdiving competition, and possibly get a chance to jump. We didn't pre-register for the event since our decision was so last minute, but we did show up early enough that we were able to get one of the walk-on slots.

The dogs compete in waves, which are a set of two jumps per dog. Prior to the waves the dogs had a 90 minute window to do practice jumping. The first wave was made up largely of new dogs, most who hadn't been up on the scaffolding and hadn't seen a pool. All of them were comfortable jumping from a wood dock which reached out into a natural body of water as opposed to being on a raised platform above a five foot deep aboveground pool. Many were willing to go into the pool off of the dock. Many never did. Blast was initially tentative but became more confident with each try. We took more warm up jumps than most of the other people, which gave us nice early jumps. Blast was the first of the first wave dogs (and the only non-lab) to be jumping much distance, which was great in terms of crowd enthusiasm and support. He jumped 12'?" on his best jump of the first wave. During warmups for the second wave he was jumping more than that. Blast had a nice, long final practice jump before the start of the second wave and then didn't want to jump anymore. He was still glad to run up the stairway to the scaffold dock, play with the toys, but didn't want to jump. I've been going over it again and again in my head, but have been unable to come up with a reasonable explanation for the sudden change. Saturday morning we arrived for the warmups for the third wave, but again Blast would not go into the pool. I decided at that time that the wise thing to do was to stop before we began establishing any bad habits.

When we got home Sunday night I took Blast and Ringer over to a local lake where Blast did his normal enthusiastic long jumping off the dock. He was spectacular again this morning, going higher and farther than he has ever gone in the past.

We were already scheduled for a dockdiving seminar next weekend, so hopefully this will give us a chance to learn more, work on skill development and possibly jump from a competition dock again. I had been told that it's a big step from a wooden dock to a competition scaffolding dock and now have a real understanding of that. Whatever happens though it's not life or death, but just another thing to do!

Thanks to Marian (my date) and Tom, Mary, Jerry and Charlotte (my dock training/critiquing teammates) for all of their encourgement, support and willingness to always help assess what's working well and what isn't as we collectively try to better get a handle on yet another dogsport.

Blast is shown below with loot from Friday when he earned his his first leg toward his junior title. As you can see he's pretty happy about it!