Kingston waterfront news: October 2008

PHOTOS OF NEW WIND FARM TOWERS can be viewed on Gordon Campbell's blog.

Kingston's Waterfront has changed, starting now.

AT COUNCIL this upcoming Tuesday, two related items about Crawford Wharf. Coincidence?

• $130,000 request for overdue maintenance of Crawford Wharf.
• A Kingston-based promoter is seeking support from Council for Kingston to become a 2009 port of call for Pearl Seas Cruises and their 335-foot cruise ship Pearl Mist using, you guessed it, Crawford Wharf.

But,

In real terms most cruise ships would start off by including Kingston as a port-of-call with a brief stay of several hours in port. This would offer the downtown merchants an opportunity to sell their wares and nearby and mid-distance attractions to be included in shore excursions.

Therefore this is for quickies, the 200 passengers being roughly equivalent to just three busloads, a few times per year, for a few hours each time.

How Crawford Wharf trumps other deferred maintenance in Kingston, nevermind just waterfront-related deferred maintenance, is anybody's guess.

THE FIRST WOLFE ISLAND WIND TURBINE, Tower 19, is on the north side of Reeds Bay.

It won't appear very large when viewed from Kingston. Some subsequent towers will be 3-miles closer to Kingston than this one.

NAVY BAY'S EASTERN SHORE is a half-mile stretch of shoreline that runs from RMC to Point Henry.

It's less than a mile from downtown Kingston.

It's inaccessible, derelict and, when explored in mid-October 2008, trash-strewn.

Through various levels of government, taxpayers pump millions into Fort Henry each year. From a waterfront accessibility and recreation perspective, we get nothing back.

Kingston's Waterfront is all the poorer for that.

A NEW WEBSITE for the Kingston-based Canadian Yachting Association. It's a huge improvement.

But there's no CYA blog, and no news syndication in RSS format. In that sense, it's also a disappointment.

Hopefully those relatively easy-gets are coming.

THE 2015 TORONTO PAN-AMERICAN GAMES BID, specifically the sailing event, is discussed in Wednesday's Whig.

What The Whig doesn't tell us is the Toronto bid has been highly public for three weeks already.

There's more: Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty was on-hand in Acapulco, Mexico to launch the bid just prior to Thanksgiving. The Toronto bid is slick; their ducks are aligned. Harvey Rosen wasn't on the trip.

From The Globe and Mail, three weeks ago on October 3rd:

The bid is Toronto-branded, meaning organizers will peddle the Pan Am bid internationally using the country's largest city as a hook. However, Toronto's main events likely will be the opening and closing ceremonies. Sports venues are most likely to go into the region covered by the 905 area code: Vaughan, Markham, Durham, Peel-Halton and the Niagara Region.

Here's the bid home page. There's nothing specific there yet.

But there's definitely a sense that Kingston's on the outside, looking-in at this point.

More to the point: each time Toronto bids for a major games, why is Kingston always the supplicant for the sailing event? It's worth asking: Hey Toronto! what's your problem?

Maybe one reason Toronto seems to come-up short in its games bids is because of Toronto's inability to leverage its proven world-class, world-renowned assets, like Kingston for sailing, for example.

Another way to look at it is: if the Toronto 2015 bid doesn't showcase Kingston for sailing, then perhaps Toronto doesn't deserve to win. Certainly everyone will know, at least as far as sailing is concerned, that it's all about the politics, not the competitors.

What's not in doubt is this: Since 1976 Summer Games, Kingston hasn't been resting on its laurels. Kingston has earned it.

THE LIVING AT THE BARRICADES PODCAST from October 16, 2008 titled Landfills, Leachate and Law is very interesting because it contains a lengthy segment on the Belle Park leaching landfill case, which the City of Kingston fought for eight years all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

That was embarassing for the City of Kingston. Harvey Rosen was Mayor of Kingston through most of the the appeals.

The segment following Kingston's is about the City of Hamilton which pled guilty to similar charges at the first opportunity, wasting no time towards fixing the problem.

THE 120-FOOT HMS DETROIT REPLICA, which berthed at Confed last week, is the subject of photos submitted by John Duerkop. The vessel is on its way to Newport, R.I..

This replica was the subject of a Whig aticle last week about long-ago scuttled plans for a waterfront heritage centre in Kingston. The Whig re-surfaces the notion of transforming the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes into a showpiece tourism attraction in this Monday's editorial.

To be blunt, it's a silly idea.

Considering the average Kingstonian has no relationship whatsoever with the waterfront, local-citizen access should come long before the so-called needs of hypothetical "wealthy european tourists". Kingston needs to become a better place to live, not a better tourist trap.

STILL MORE IMPRESSIVE SIGHTS at Kingston Marina recently as they hoisted-out Island Belle for bottom cleaning and painting.

Thanks again to John Duerkop for these photos.

In The Whig today: Underwater wires connect Kingston, island.

Here's a link to a nice diagram of the cable's route.

Also, here are photos of the excavation activity in Sand Bay in August, where the cable lands on the Kingston-side.

And THIS IS AWESOME, especially the latter parts of the 53-pages titled "WOLFE ISLAND CABLE ROUTE SURVEY". C:\Wikis\K7Waterfront\FTPRoot\Files

IMPRESSIVE SIGHTS on Kingston's waterfront late last week. MetalCraft Marine rolled-out the hull of their largest fireboat ever.

The purpose of this was to mate it with its superstructure. Hulls are built upside-down so rotating the hull was part of the process.

This fireboat is destined for service in Tampa, Florida. Thanks to John Duerkop for the photos.

THE AMHERST ISLAND WIND INFORMATION WEB SITE seems worth bookmarking. It has an RSS feed as well.

THIS MONTH-OLD HALF-BAKED WATERFRONT-RELATED MOTION was again debated then soundy defeated at Council last night.

GARISH NEW STREET LIGHTS, seven of them, on Point Frederick. They are spaced less than 30m apart.

These are a butt-ugly addition to a prime piece of Kingston Waterfront.

THE BLACK ANGUS was hauled-out for the winter on Tuesday at Kingston Marina. Click the photo to see more.

The Black Angus is the 100-year-old 28-foot wood double-ended clinker fishing boat restored by volunteers at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes and re-launched this August after 7,000 hours of restauration.

Thanks to John Duerkop for the photos.

DIESEL FUEL SPILL, hundreds of litres worth, by a Wolfe Island wind project tug boat off Dawson point, which is the winter ferry dock on Wolfe Island.

Update: Thursday's Whig story.

Update: CBC.ca's report.

Update: More from CKWS-TV.