The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

WALLA WALLA-The Walla Walla Fair and Frontier Days added a new specialty act for their 2021 line-up. DockDogs is a dock diving orgnazation offering competitions in this exciting, nationally recognized competitive dog sport.

You may ask, what is dock diving? The sport combines two favorite dog pastimes, swimming and chasing toys. Canine atheletes race down a dock, launch into the air in pursuit of a high-value toy or toy "bumper," then splashes into a pool or other body of water.

It doesn't matter if the dog actually catches the toy. What matters is the distance it leaps, measured from the end of the dock to where the base of the dog's tail (where the tail attaches to the body) enters the water, according to North America Diving Dogs (NADD), one of several dock diving organizations in the United States.

Dock Dogs takes the competition even further. In addition to "Big Air," a competition similar to the long jump exercise described above, they also promote "Extreme Vertical," an event that measures how high a dog can leap off the dock to capture a toy dangling above the water.

Enjoy the spectacular abilities of amazing dogs on all five days of the fair as they compete in the Big Air, Extreme Vertical, and Speed Retrieve competitions, with the finals on Sunday at 6:30 PM.

Watch the fair schedule for daily times of this attraction. For more information, e-mail info@wallawallafairgrounds.com or call the main office at (509) 527-3247.

The Walla Walla Fair and Frontier Days theme is "Stars and Stripes and Country Nights" and runs from September 1-5.The show is sponsored by Banner Bank.