Kingston waterfront news: July 2007
WELL OVER 800 PEOPLE took advantage of boat rides on Saturday and Sunday during the Kingston Discover Boating Event. See also the related article in today's Whig-Standard.
NEW MOORING FIELD on the South side of Kingston Harbour, just off the The Island Grill on Wolfe Island, just East of the Wolfe Island Ferry dock.
A total of 10 moorings, available free for now, though the plan is to eventually charge overnight, monthly, or yearly rates.
Outer moorings have a depth of 14 feet, shallowing to 7ft for the inner ones. No reservations are currently required.
See also our Island Grill topic, and the Anchoring topic, still a work in progress, is updated to reflect these new moorings.
NATHAN BARON'S MINI TRANSAT SLOOP arrived in Kingston yesterday and was launched at Collins Bay Marina. Lots of photos
on Flickr.
Nathan hopes to compete in the 2009 Mini Transat race between France and South America.
July 27 2007 UPDATE: Front-page story in The Whig-Standard.
It's been a while since we've featured the THE LATEST GREAT LAKES WATER LEVELS FORECAST by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Lake Ontario levels are about six inches below normal for this time of year, so beware.
There are still SOME AVAILABLE SAILING CAMP SPOTS in August at the Kingston Yacht Club Sailing School and at the Collins Bay Yacht Club Sailing School. Pass the word.
TUESDAY'S COUNCIL AGENDA includes an additional $60,000 operating grant to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes.
See also Exhibit 'A' - Marine Museum of the Great Lakes 2007 Business Plan which is interesting, and underscores that the Museum needs your support too.
THE FINAL DAY OF RACING AT THE VOLVO YOUTH SAILING ISAF WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS saw just one race as planned. Winds were very shifty from the Nortwest that, at times when competitors were on water, gusted to thirty knots and above. Results here.
THE 2007 VOLVO YOUTH SAILING ISAF WORLD CHAMPIONS
Boys One
Person Dinghy: Laser (Pavlos Kontides, Cyprus)
Girls
One Person Dinghy: Laser Radial (Gabrielle King, AUS)
Boys Two
Person Dinghy: 29er (Henrik Sogaard, Soren Kristensen, DEN)
Girls Two
Person Dinghy: 29er (Emily Dellenbaugh, Briana Provancha, USA)
Boys
Windsurfer (Pierre Le Coq, FRA)
Girls
Windsurfer (Laura Linares, ITA)
Open
Multihull: Hobie Cat 16 Race Spinnaker (Richard Glover, Andrew Glover, GBR)
Our List Of Major Regattas In Kingston has been updated with these seven new world champions.
PHOTOS OF THE FAIR JEANNE FIRE from the Clayton Fire Department. The vessel shown responding in the photos is one built by MetalCraft Marine of Kingston.
A DAY ON THE LIGHT-SIDE: Here's what
iWindsurf.com recorded for wind on Day 4 of the ISAF Volvo Youth Worlds.
If you are in VHF radio range of Kingston Harbour, and are able to listen-in, here are the channels for Volvo Youth Worlds regatta.
- Orange course (VHF 10): Skiffs and Cats.
- Blue course (VHF 72): Boards
- Yellow course (VHF 69): Lasers
Highlight of Day 4: A bullet and a 2nd for Isabella Bertold of Canada in Girls Laser Radial who sits in 5th with three more races to sail.
Canada is tied for 13th overall for the Volvo Trophy which, at the top, is a 3-way race betweem Australia, Denmark, and New Zeland. Looking down from there, the UK is 6th and the USA is 7th.
There are three interesting waterfront-related items on the CITY'S PLANNING COMMITTEE AGENDA for Thursday, July 19 2007.
- A 106 page PDF on an Ontario Municipal Board Appeal of the Cataraqui West development along Collins Creek.
- The public hearing report (24-page.PDF) on the proposed towers on Elevator Bay. More on the proposed Elevatror Bay development here.
- More details, Draft Plan of Subdivision and Draft Plan of Condominium, (38-page.PDF) on the Stirling Bridge Company's proposed development on the North side of John Counter Boulevard along the Great Cataraqui River. More on the Stirling Bridge Company's proposed development here.
Lots of interesting diagrams in all three of these documents.
A reminder: THE CFB KINGSTON DOLPHIN SCUBA CLUB BLOG regularly covers another great aspect of Kingston's waterfront, its underwater world. The Dolphin SCUBA Club is active all year 'round (link to photos on Flickr), which is amazing.
YOUTH WORLDS DAY 3 started looking good for lighter crews but, in the end, Kingston Harbour served-up something for everyone.
The first race on Yellow Course (Cats and 29ers) was set at 240 degrees and later settled in the 200-220 degree range.
The Yellow Course committee still didn't place itself according to plans. As a result the reach legs are susceptible to nasty blasts, funneled by the Boat Channel South of Simcoe Island (whose axis is oriented about 230 magnetic) and fans-out, mixing with overland air, upon reaching the harbour.
AFTER RACING DAY TWO AT THE ISAF YOUTH WORLDS, we can start to say the regatta's eventual winners will have really earned it.
Winds started West and fair but it picked up and backed suddenly around 11:30am and, by first guns at noon it was snorting. It mostly built from there.
Yellow Course was set at 245 degrees, and that never changed. By session's end around 2:30pm, with gusts close to 30 at times and with carnage looming, they called it a day. Another good call.
Results here. Best Canadian after Day 2 is David Hayes of Toronto, currently in a podium position in Boys Windsurfer thanks to a bullet in the last race today.
RACING DAY ONE AT THE ISAF YOUTH WORLDS was cloudy with shifty, diminishing and, eventually, backing breezes to below 180 degrees.
There was a notable discrepancy between the planned and actual location of the Yellow Course (Hobie Cat and 29er classes).
IT WAS AN UNUSUAL DAY WIND-WISE for the Volvo Youth Worlds practice races, which were supposed to happen on three race circles in early afternoon.
A heck of a cell went through just before 9am, and it looked to be a fair day after that. But a sequence cells passed through around mid-day, and the wind built dramatically throughout the afternoon.
It turned into a classic Kingston buster, with the wind sensor at Kingston Yacht Club recording gusts to 40 knots. The competitors were on water for a short while, blasting around, but the practice races never happened. Good call.
Here is the trace of average wind from the Kingston Yacht Club. Anybody know why the pre-9am squall shows distinctively on the iWindsurf.com sensor, but not the Kingston Yacht Club sensor? Both sensors are mounted at the end of the pier of the Kingston Yacht Club. Maybe the squall was so brief there that it doesn't factor when averaged?
There's a NEW ALL-PURPOSE JUNIOR SQUADRON SHED at Kingston Yacht Club close to being complete. It will be used as a workshop for boat repairs on KYC's impressive dinghy fleet, sail storage, and can also serve as an activity room when the weather's poor.
Last year KYC renovated the boathouses on the East side of the property, along Simcoe Street.
It's good to see visible signs of upgrades on the waterfront.
THE KINGSTON DISCOVER BOATING EVENT returns to Confederation Basin Marina, Saturday and Sunday July 28th and 29th between 10am and 5pm.
Free boat rides for all who wish to give boating a try.
This event is courtesy of many volunteer boat owners and several of our local marinas: Collins Bay Marina, Ed Huck Marine (of Rockport), Kingston Marina, Treasure Island Marina, River Rat Marine (in Landsdowne, ON) with space and dockage provided by the City of Kingston's Confederation Basin Marina.
Now GRASS CREEK PARK BEACH IS POSTED due to E. Coli.
METALCRAFT MARINE IS FRONT-PAGE NEWS in yesterday's Whig Standard.
"The truth of the matter is there is no one doing it better right now than MetalCraft"
That's saying something.
AT NEXT TUESDAY'S COUNCIL MEETING, City staff seeks to declare the property at 5 Brock Street as surplus, paving the way for its sale to the Hotel that surrounds it.
This is primo commonwealth property on the waterfront, adjacent to our downtown docks, and across the street from City Hall, Confederation Park, Confederation Basin, and historic Market Square.
Or is it, potentially, Starbucks'?
UP TO THE GILLS -- POLLUTION IN GREAT LAKES FISH is a 15-page report by Environmental Defence released on July 5th, 2007.
In short:
- Toxic chemicals in Great Lakes fish are alarmingly high and becoming more serious over time.
- Lake Ontario is the worst of all the Great Lakes.
- Toxins that once only surfaced in big fish are making their way down the food chain, to smaller fish.
Here's Recommendation 1 (of 8 in total) which is interesting:
RECOMMENDATION 1: In order to provide a more realistic representation of the state of fish contamination in the Great Lakes and improve fish advisories as an indicator of Great Lakes health, provincial, state and national partners in the U.S. and Canada must develop and maintain a publicly accessible record of information on the current status, evolution and historical levels of chemical contamination of fish in the Great Lakes, including information on the toxicity levels in and around the Great Lakes basin.
In other words: That's not happening now.
RESULTS FROM THE 505 Canadians, Kingston's first notable sailing regatta of 2007, are finally up. Winners were Americans Tyler Moore and Jessie Falsone.
More: Kingston's regatta history is updated.
GEOFF WEBSTER has been photographing sailing in Kingston, including CORK, for over 25 years.
He's just self-published a booklet of 50 photos, taken from over 80,000+ in his collection, titled SAIL KINGSTON -- Fresh Water Sailing Capital Of The World.
He also has collections of photos from CORKs-past available on DVD, and these may be purchased by contacting Geoff at
Geoff Webster
Photographer
613-354-3569
PhotoOne@ihorizons.net
LAW-ENFORCEMENT THEATRE Wednesday night at Collins Bay Marina as the OPP Marine Unit books a sailor from a group of several yachts from Rochester NY traveling together.
The individual was in small tender, simply going from C-Dock to A-Dock, from one docked yacht to another, while impaired.
Word around the marina is there was no party going on, sleeping boaters on "C" and "A" docks heard nothing unusual, and the guy apparently wasn't lippy with the cops.
There are, of course, two ways to view this.
But there are lessons here:
- Should you be operating a vessel while impaired? No.
- Is the Kingston OPP Marine Unit over-zealous? Apparently so. But then again, nobody witnessed the arrest, and few of us can list hauling corpses out of the water among our duties, so it's hard to say.
- What might this incident cost in American tourism terms? That's incalculable.
Moreover: How does this story come to find its way onto CKWS-TV News?
You decide. It's all about choices people make, on both sides of the badge.
THE PROVINCE PROVIDES $80,000 FOR THE ISAF VOLVO YOUTH WORLDS REGATTA, just two weeks before the start of the event, which is cutting it pretty close.
Now ROTARY PARK BEACH IS POSTED CLOSED due to high E. coli levels (again from The Whig Standard, and not the Health Unit website).
Last year, Rotary Park Beach was closed in late July, which at the time was Kingston's first beach closure in 14 years. That closure forced the nearby Collins Bay Yacht Club to stop in-water instruction until the beach re-opened.
What the heck is polluting our west-end beaches?