Celebrating and watching the Kingston Ontario waterfront

"WATERFRONT ACCESS" FINALLY appears to mean more than a future proximate footpath in a City of Kingston planning document.

This may be the first time that accessibility for shore diving is mentioned in a City of Kingston planning document.

The latest Comprehensive Planning Report to Planning Committee about the proposed Queen's Performing Arts Building at the Tett Centre says the following:

...the residents of the City of Kingston have enjoyed access to the water from this location for many decades for both passive enjoyment and active recreation, such as scuba diving. The wreck of the HMS St. Lawrence, largest War of 1812 battleship to sail the great lakes is located in 2 metres of water in front of this property and has a close post war association with the subject property.

The easement for public access along the waterfront will be included as part of the Site Plan Control process.

It's one thing to compel others, like Queen's University in this case, to build-in waterfront access. It would be nice if The City of Kingston did likewise for its own waterfront properties.

GREAT FORTNIGHT for Kingston's Berg Ellmers, 12-years old, who along with Ali Tenhove finished 12th overall in the 96-boat 420-class at CORK (for youth 19-and-under) and finished 10th overall at the 76-boat Optimist Canadian Championships (for youth aged 15-and-under) which just concluded in Hamilton.

DETAILS AND DIAGRAMS of the proposed Main Duck Island wind farm.

CORK International gets underway this week, Monday through Thursday inclusive.

This is the youth portion of CORK, the first of three major CORK events this month. The forecast for the first two days is windy.

Here's how the race areas are split along the waterfront. Click the image below for a larger annotated version.

• The 420 class is on Course Bravo.
• Laser, Laser 4.7 and all Byte classes are on Course Golf.
• Optimist and O'Pen Bic are on courses Mike and Alpha
• The 29er North Americans, this week's premier event, is on Course Echo.
• The Laser Radial class is on Course Charlie.

OPEN HOUSE at MetalCraft Marine on Friday August 20th 2010 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. The theme is working waterfront.

If you haven't seen what goes on this part of the Inner Harbour, you really should.

RFP FOR RICHARDSON BEACH RENOVATIONS (7.3Mb.zip file).

If you find anything in there related to improving swimming at Richardson Beach, do tell.

BRACE YOURSELF: Waterfront accessibility appears to take significant importance in the Application for Zoning Bylaw Amendment for the Tett Centre which is on the Cily's Planning Committee agenda for tonight, August 5th.

Unfortunately there is no mention of accessibility for SCUBA diving, given that the Tett Centre property has been used for years to access one of Kingston's best shore dives.

DETAILS of the 2nd stage of the Third Crossing environmental assessment which will commence shortly.

The latest WATER LEVEL REPORT from the US Army Corps of Engineers is up..

Levels are much better; we're at the the long-term average, still about 5" below last year at this time.

KINGSTON IN A NUTSHELL: you mismanage maintenance at Confed, then you fail to respond to a visitor, then the visitor runs aground, then the local rag puts him on the front page, complete with photo.

Bravo!

WE HAVE A WINNER!

"Poker boats bring three to five million bucks to the city in three days."

-- Bob Ackley, muscle boat owner.

There's your stereotype, right there.

Read the whole thing.

PRO-AM BASS DERBY IN TOWN through Saturday, from CKWS-TV News.

It's the Kingston Canadian Open of Fishing, also on Facebook.

CHALLENGES of shipwreck preservation.

COVERAGE of last Saturday's fire at Rideau Marina that destroyed their maintenance shop from The Whig, CKWS-TV News, and MetalCraft Marine.

WATERFRONT TRAIL PROPOSAL from downtown to Kingston Mills on the western shore of the Cataraqui River according to CKWS-TV News last week.

Never going to happen, at least not to the extent they imply in the news item. The Great Cataraqui Marsh is inviolable.

See for yourself the relationship between the water, the Marsh, and the CN tracks.

THE POKER RUN is on the FOCUS Kingston Steering Committee Agenda for their July 15th meeting.

It's amazing that a KEDCO report that KEDCO itself says is inaccurate and statistically insignificant is nonetheless touted, again, by City Staff apparently desperate to supinate for the BIA, greenwash the event, and give all this a positive cultural and historical spin.

Still no word on requiring Poker Runs America to purchase obnoxious-offset-credits.

Shorts:

KINGSTONIST on Token Park.

METALCRAFT MARINE just splashed a 69-foot red fireboat equipped with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) defenses. It's destined for Jacksonville but you'll be seeing its sea trials here in Kingston Harbour over the next few months.

The rather windy OPTIMIST NORTH AMERICANS, which wrapped last Sunday, was swept by Americans including two brothers, Christopher and Duncan Williford, who finnished top-two in the very strong 196-boat fleet. How strong? The top Canadian was 35th.

PHOTOS from the World Robotic Sailing Championships, which went under-the-radar in Kingston this Spring.

NICE WEATHER AHEAD.

Last time this happened was mid-May and it didn't turn out that way.

GREAT REGATTA so far at the Optimist North American Championships.

See over 3,000 photos by Geoff Webster and David Hein. Wow.

THE OPTIMIST NORTH AMERICANS get underway today. Very impressive list of 195 competitors from all over the world.

They will be racing on Course Alpha in Kingston Harbour. Here's a link to the sailing instructions.

SATURDAY FOR KIDS each Saturday morning at the Marine Museum throughout the summer.

STALE SEWAGE BYPASS LOG, three months out of date, on the Utilities Kingston website.

See also our archive of sewer bypass news items. Utilities Kingston is a disgrace when it comes to reporting and disclosure.

HIGH MUCKY-MUCKS set to unveil Token Park on Monday.

Presumably there will be much collegial back-slapping amongst those who've done a great job recently ruining Kingston's waterfront.

More details on the whole Token Park waterfront accessibility and functionality downgrade.

A FIFTH of all Lake Ontario Beaches are currently posted unsafe according to Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

Meanwhile, here in Kingston, there is still no beach report avaiable from our lard-ass Health Unit.

RECENTLY IN THE WHIG: Plans at CORK, Laser sailor Robert Davis, and a letter calling for more public waterfront access.

SEVERAL SPOTS still available at the Kingston Yacht Club Sailing School, even the July sessions, for both kid's and adult programs. This includes some openings on their well-known racing team.

WINDFARM TURBINES on Wolfe Island are "shockingly" deadly for birds, bats from Wednesday's Globe and Mail.

SCOOP: The Brown's Bay Inn was recently sold and apparently it's going to become a yoga resort.

NEARLY A THOUSAND LIGHTHOUSES declared surplus by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Kingston-area lights at Nine-mile Point on Simcoe Island, Quebec Head on Wolfe Island, False Duck Island, Main Duck Island, Nicholson's Point, and Pigeon Island are all on the list..

The surplus lighthouses are those that Canadian Coast Guard officials determined "could be replaced with simpler structures whose operation and maintenance would be more cost-effective..."

Shorts:

TWO ENGINEERING JOBS at MetalCraft Marine

STILL no beach report from our lard-ass Health Unit.

NAVAL RE-ENACTMENT this weekend.

KINGSTON'S FIREBOAT is named the Thomas H. Patterson.

RON BROWN on Kingston: catastrophe on the Cataraqui.

In his view, Kingston is a prime example of how not to treat a shoreline.

PHOTOGRAPHER IAN CORISTINE, who has made a career photographing the Thousand Islands region from the air, was featured in the Brockville Times Recorder last week.

KINGSTON ROWERS perform well at last weekend's World Cup event in Bled, Slovenia.

Bled, Slovenia, is the site of next year's World Rowing Championships.

700 KIDS is reportedly the turnout to last weekend's Perch Derby at Pourtsmouth Olympic Harbour. Excellent!. This event is surely one of the greatest things about Kingston waterfront.

Cute photos in The Whig.

SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK because there's no beach report avaiable from our lard-ass Health Unit.

It's only 31 degrees outside today. This has been forecast for quite some time.

There's been no signal that the KFLA Health Unit will be making-up the miles they are behind Toronto in beach report timeliness and data quality.

WATER WARNING in last Saturday's Whig, about the police state that has become our local waterways.

How bad could this get? Remember this law enforcement theatre from early July 2007. That was pretty damn bad.

134-PAGE KERFUFFLE for just one item on the Planning Committee agenda for May 20th.

It's about an Official Plan Amendment, a Zoning Bylaw Amendment and Draft Plan of Subdivision for Baxter Farm Subdivision on Hwy 15.

The western edge of this proposed subdivision would approach the Cataraqui River.

What's hilarious is the degree to which our country-bumpkin' politicians, staff, and some other morons are so conveniently, or so easily, UNESCOed.

SWEET FORECAST.

Last time this happened was last August.

KINGSTON'S 2010 REGATTA PICTURE looks good again this year.

No world championships this year, but seven North American Championships.

Here's how 2010 shapes-up compared to previous years.

More details in our list of major regattas in Kingston.

REVISED DOWNWARD for May and June. Ouch!

REMINDER that April 30th is the deadline to fill-out the City of Kingston's truly asinine Poker Run Feedback form.

$1.5 BILLION is allegedly the cost of the proposed offshore wind project, in today's Whig. It's to be centred on Pigeon Island.

The article is actually funny, especially the the parts about KEDCO. Read the whole thing.

One possible interpretation of the article: arrogant city-slickers chatting-up a hick-town newspaper reporter.

STILL BLEAK is the spring water level forecast.

PLEASURE CRAFT OPERATOR TESTING is available at the Marine Museum in partnership with the Kingston Power and Sail Squadron.

Further information: Ann Blake, Executive Director 613 542-2261 or ablake@marmuseum.ca.

GONE WITH THE WIND by Waterkeeper Mark Mattson in The Mark.

The short takeaway: lobbying by industry has become much too powerful in the decision-making "process" in Ontario.

THE APRIL ISSUE of the Thousand Islands Life e-zine is online. It includes an interesting story about phone service on Wolfe Island.

MOORING SEASON is off to a great start according to the Preserve Our Wrecks blog.

DIRECT LINK to the City of Kingston's multiple-choice Poker Run Feedback survey.

It's a shame that the environmental aspect of the Poker Run seems to have singularly hijacked the conversation. "The environment" has always been a side-issue, and everybody knows it.

The survey offers no selection akin to "the Poker Run is OBNOXIOUS" which would be close to the median viewpoint on the matter.

UNCHARTED TERRITORY: the province is supposedly working on standards for offshore wind projects, in today's Whig.

300 MW WIND PROJECT APPROVED offshore of Wolfe Island in today's Globe and Mail.

Er, what??

Apparently this has been approved but nobody seems to know where, or any other details for that matter. For comparison, the existing wind turbines are rated at 197.8 MW.

POKER RUN PUBLIC MEETING to...

...gauge community views regarding the cultural and social impacts of the Poker Run at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 22, in Memorial Hall, City Hall, 216 Ontario St.

A funny coincidence: April 22nd is Earth Day.

Given past Downtown Kingston shenanigans, it will be interesting to see who chairs the meeting.

Certainly the meeting location, and meeting start-time, are ideal for our self-serving report-publishing Downtown Kingston friends.

COLLINS BAY MARINA reports they started launching boats last Thursday, on April 1st.

That's ten-days earlier than their previous record of April 10th, back in 2006.

GOOD ATTENDANCE -- some 6,000 visitors -- at the first 1000 Islands Boat Show, from Boating Business.

SAVE KINGSTON'S WATERFRONT! is a new Facebook group you can join.

Currently the group appears focused on saving Douglas Fluhrer Park from the Wellington Street Extension though, certainly, there's more to save.

AN ILLUSTRATION of something that's so-wrong with our waterfront. The shoreline is a continuous physical barrier, with no breaks with access in mind.

CATHCART REDOUBT on Cedar Island is looking very, very good after its repointing and renovation.

ESTIMATED ECONOMIC IMPACT ASSESSMENT of the 2009 Thousand Islands Poker Run is on Council's next agenda.

The KEDCO report is based on a survey (conducted by the Downtown BIA) and phone interviews (with spokespersons for Poker Runs America and Power Boating Canada).

All strong proponents of the Poker Run.

Despite the claim of attracting 14,500 spectators, KEDCO and the BIA could gather only 91 survey responses. These are noted as follows:

It should be noted that conclusions based on 91 results is "statistically insignificant" and does not adequately reflect the overall economic impact of the event. In this case, the economic impact report is inaccurate and would not be considered as part of a post-analysis report.

So the survey results are not reliable and are of no value. However, this doesn't prevent KEDCO from extrapolating conclusions and tabling them with six- and seven-digit precision.

Does the report contain some reliable information?

Apparently not. The report doesn't tell us how many boats were in in the 2009 Poker Run.

The number of boats according to The Whig last August, was "more than 60" which is far less than the hundred or hundreds usually touted by organizers.

Wouldn't you expect KEDCO to provide, at a minimum, data that could be used, for future comparisons?. By omitting the number of boats from this economic impact report -- one of the only available objective measures of event quality and scale -- KEDCO effectively delivers a report with little future-reference value.

The report claims that the 2009 event had 304 participants, or 360 participants depending on whether you read paragraph 3, or paragraph 4, on page 7 ( page 11 of the council PDF). How "more than 60-boats" turns into KEDCO's "304 participants" or "360 participants", including spouses and children, we do not know..

In view of the non-disclosure of the number of boats, the lumping of driver's spouses and children to inflate the number of "event participants", this all appears very suspicious.

Furthermore there's no mention of any negative survey responses. Several survey questions have "good" at the low-end of multiple-choice responses but a possible response of "poor" was only related to the questions related to "music quality" and "the variety of events".

In many respects this KEDCO report, as tabled, tells us a lot about KEDCO and the BIA in the Rosen-era.

In effect, the report says "we have no reliable data" and "we don't tell you even the easiest objective metrics" but, nonetheless, "the poker-run generates MILLIONS".

Related to that, the report's cover-page is notable because of its Disclaimer and the Release of Liability Statement, which we haven't seen before from KEDCO.

Do you think this might be, partly, because of fallout from KEDCO's Economic Benefits of the LVEC report from 2005?

HIGH LEVELS OF MERCURY found in sediment of the Cataraqui River, according to a Queen's University study.

Most of the western shore of the Cataraqui River south of Belle Park and above the LaSalle Causeway Bridge had levels of contamination, with the worst area around the Cataraqui Canoe Club, just south of the former Davis Tannery.

We're talking levels more than twice the federal government's most severe effect limits.

Here's a link to the report's abstract and the report itself can be purchased for US $31.50.

Oddly our once-venerable Whig gave this a completely different spin on March 18th. Their headline was: No longer a threat

CKWS-TV News gave us an apparently more balanced protrayal of the Queen's University report.

SEVEN WEEKS AFTER THE FACT the Whig finally reports on Kingston's 118 million litre sewage dump into local waterways.

KINGSTON FIGURES PROMINENTLY in the latest Lake Ontario Waterkeeper Podcast (in iTunes) and also avaiable here on their website

A comparison to previous years suggests that Kingston may be on its way to one of its worst sewage pollution years yet.

METALCRAFT MARINE is featured in today's Report on Business.

SLOW, FRUSTRATING PROGRESS on deferred maintenance at Richardson Beach, in today's Whig.

THE FORECAST for spring water levels remains bleak.

LARGELY LOST IN THE EXCITEMENT of the recent Olympic coverage was the release of the City of Kingston's Official Plan.

Not much has changed since this post from January 2009, about the draft-version of this.

Waterfront doesn't factor for much beyond cursory platitudes. That's a shame.

PAUL RUSHTON, perennial CORK volunteer and good friend of the waterfront, has passed away.

The memorial reception will be held on Saturday, March 6 from 5-7 pm at James Reid on Counter Blvd.

THE MARINE MUSEUM is on Facebook. This is a good thing because, like many organizations, it has been struggling with its website.

The best improvement is the coherent events page.

CONCEPT PLAN for Richardson Beach and Bath House in Tuesday's Council agenda. It's a 4-page PDF.

TWO TIER ENVIRONMENTALISM, the latest Lake Ontario Waterkeeper podcast, is excellent, excellent, excellent.

NINE OPTIONS for the third crossing in the EA update to Council next Tuesday night.

But that's probably theatre.

Tentatively, a report recommending the preferred option for the third crossing will be presented to Council on April 20th along with a staff briefing.

Can anyone imagine any recommendation other than the original route between Counter (Elliott) and Gore Road?

COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING REPORT for the River Park Subdivision on the Cataraqui River at Counter Blvd is before Council at the February 2nd meeting.

Looking at the document, is there a waterfront park planned for the River Park Subdivision? Not seeing it.

THE POKER RUN is Bill Hutchins' subject in last week's issue of Kingston EMC. (Does anyone cover the Council beat better than Bill Hutchins?)

A "SAFETY AT SEA" SEMINAR is open to all sail or power boaters on April 10, 2010 at the OISE Auditorium in Toronto.

This information-rich, one day seminar, provides the training necessary to handle emergencies away from land and is an asset for offshore or short handed crews.

Presented and endorsed by, among others, the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, US Sailing, and the Lake Ontario 300.

BUD GORMELY, past chairman of CORK, is to be inducted into the Kingston District Sports Hall of Fame later this Spring.

Quoting from the story in last week's Kingston EMC:

Marsha Gormley was happy to hear that her husband Russell "Bud" Gormley had been inducted into the Hall of Fame. She just wished that he could have been there to enjoy the honour.

Indeed. This honour is probably 20-years overdue.

Bud Gormley is remembered as a pioneer of the Canadian Olympic Regatta Kingston (CORK). During the 1976 Olympic Games, Gormley was known as the unofficial mayor of the Olympic Village at the Portsmouth Olympic Harbour. He was a key organizer of many other international sailing events in Kingston. Later in his life, Gormley carried out several humanitarian missions in the Dominican Republic.

Here's more on Bud Gormley.

Have a look at this sortable list of past HOF inductees. Rowing and sailing combined account for just six of 111 inductees. Baseball accounts for 28.

IT'S THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY ALREADY.

Here is the status of online marketing efforts by several prominent waterfront-related organizations for the summer of 2010.

• Poker Runs America: 2010 details online (Aug 6-7-8).
• CORK: 2010 details online, plus tentative dates for 2011 through 2014.
• City Marinas: 2010 rates and dates online.
• Kingston Yacht Club: nothing posted.
• Collins Bay Yacht Club: nothing posted.
• Kingston Dragon Boat Festival: nothing posted.
• K-Town Triathlon: nothing posted.
• Kingston Rowing Club: not online anymore.
  

That's pathetic, no?

For the most part, 2010 dates should be posted within two weeks of the end of the 2009 boating season.

It's long-past the point of anybody caring about your Summer 2009 calendar.

HERE'S A LINK to a 44-page pollution report you may be hearing about over the next few days in the mainstream media.

Protecting the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin and Drinking Water Sources.

It's scary what gets dumped upstream and upwind of here.

THE KINGSTON ROWING CLUB let their internet domain lapse and dodgy squatters have taken it over. No link because, well, you get the picture.

K.E.A.F. SPEAKS OUT about the Poker Run on the Council agenda for next Tuesday.

That's another report that's not available online for the public.

NOTHING SAYS "KINGSTON" like the document titled City of Kingston Waterfront Strategy - Past Directions which is part of the upcoming January 7^th Planning Committee meeting agenda.

Firstly, the document is borderline unreadable! When did it ever become OK to post unreadable documents for the public? This has been going-on for years.

Secondly, the online document is incomplete.

Exhibit 'A' -- 'Waterfront Strategy - Past Directions' which forms part of this report is being circulated under separate cover.

The public needn't concern itself with the specific contents of the "approximately 40 studies and reports (that) were undertaken during the past 30 years".

Thirdly, get this:

RECOMMENDATION:

That the "Waterfront Strategy - Past Directions" document be accepted as background information for the Waterfront Strategy, which will assist in the development of policies and recommendations to conserve and manage the City's waterfront.

Well, duh!

Progress on the waterfront file is here masquerading in the form of this totally obvious "report" from Cynthia Beach (Commissioner, Sustainability and Growth) that supposedly lists the details of 40 waterfront-related studies conducted over the past 30-years, suggesting that the Planning Committee should take time to accept the recommendation to consider recommendations arising from these studies when planning for the waterfront.

And so it goes.

Ever wonder how Kingston ended-up with a wasted waterfront? One reason is we have a Planning Committee that doesn't expect very much from City staff.

This endless visionless wheel-spinning helps ensure that money for the Downtown will indeed be amply available whenever needed. So, over time, we all end-up with, among other things, our fat-cat downtown and a shamefully wasted derelict waterfront.

Skeptical about that? Flashback to January 19th 2009. Read the whole thing.

INTERESTING INTERVIEW with MetalCraft Marine Contracts Manager Bob Clark from the tradeshow floor of the 2009 International WorkBoat Convention in New Orleans, LA.

In the interview Bob talks about the history of MetalCraft Marine, and the boats they design and build. Most people in Kingston don't realize the degree to which MetalCraft Marine is a player in the high-end fireboat and patrol boat markets.

HATTERS BAY PARK is still in jeopardy according to the Portmouth Villagers Association.

You may recall that the Coast Guard wants to shift their base from the west-side to the east-side of POH, clobbering the park, or access to the park, in the process.

Read more on the issue.

SAILBOAT RIDE IN KINGSTON for the Olympic Torch relay on December 15th.

The torchbearer is Olympian and CORK chairman Tim Irwin.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: more units, less parking requested by the Elevator Bay project proponents.

Here's a roundup of Elevator Bay-related news.

THE BREAKWATER PARK RENAMING PROPOSAL is dead according to a City Staff report.

A NICE UPGRADE to the West Street Launch Ramp is presently underway.

Click here to see what it looked-like before.

THE COMPANIONWAY is the quarterly newsletter of the Kingston Squadron of the Canadian Power and Sail Squadron. The latest issue is online now.

Here's some of what's interesting in this issue:

• The Power Squadron offers a complete range of courses over the winter. There are no downsides to boating-related accreditation, it's all-good. A boating course makes a fine Christmas gift, and it's a nice shared activity.
• You may be surprised to see the number of boating and waterfront-related advertisers in the newsletter. Times may be tough but, around these parts, local businesses are continuing to step-up in support of the Power Squadron.
• Part-two of an interesting article about power boat planing hulls by E.B.(Red) Bowes. The first part of the article is here in the August issue.

HERE YOU ARE LOOKING southwest from a vantage upstairs at the Radisson Hotel. Click here for a much larger version of this photo.

What you see in the middle-distance is the tumble-stone breakwall of Confederation Basin. In the right-foreground is part of the 250 meters of new tumble-stone shoreline around Block-D's Token Park.

In the past this 250m of Block-D perimeter was a corrugated metal seawall where boats could tie-up. It was a pretty good place for boat-passenger dropoffs and pickups when the marina's docks were packed in the summertime. It was a fine venue for model-boat racing. It has been said that many late-summer-night skinny-dips took place there in the hours between closing-time and dawn.

This was, in short, usable shoreline which is in very short supply around here. But that was then.

Let history show that, in the Harvey Rosen era, the City of Kingston transformed this once-usable protected shoreline into severe inaccessible shoreline. Which begs the question: why? All this is on calm waters that are amply protected by the massive Confederation Basin breakwall.

This is another waterfront loss in Kingston, one of many that have recently occurred because of the raving lunatics who lead and manage this unfortunate city.

Thanks to Joanna Bull for the photo.

STICKING-IT to the M.O.E. in the latest Lake Ontario Waterkeeper podcast.

It's about the Lafarge case in Bath, Ontario coming to an end. It's a most excellent 26-minute listen.

THE BROWN'S BAY INN IS FOR SALE.

It's a gem on Wolfe Island, just 4-miles south-east of Confederation Basin by-boat, just east of the winter ferry dock.

THIS is scandalous. Get a load of this:

At the next Council meeting, senior city managers Cynthia Beach and Lanie Hurdle (remember the wonderful, wonderful LVEC project?) want to add $200,000 to the budget for Token Park to cover some glaring planning oversights. Like lighting, and accessibility.

To finance this, these people want to filch $55,000 from the city's waterfront improvement account, $55,000 from the cycling and pathway account, and $90,000 remaining in the City Park splash-pad account.

Because, you know, we're up-to-our-eyeballs in recreational infrastructure here in Kingston.

THE NOVEMBER ISSUE of the Thousand Islands Life e-zine is out.

Of particular local interest: Wolfe Island's Lighthouses.

The St-Lawrence II is apparently due for NEW LIFE RAFTS. They're reaching-out for funding, in this case via the Aviva Community Fund.

The Brigantine always happily accepts donations.

TWO WATERFRONT ITEMS on Tuesday's Council agenda.

• The city wants to renew a 5-year lease with The Crown for POH land and land underwater. The rental rate is ''20% of the marina's annual gross revenue'', or a payment of $75,848 in 2008.
• Kingston & the lslands Boat Lines Ltd. will keep the Island Queen, Island Belle, and Island Star at POH this winter on account of the Lasalle Causeway lift-bridge being out-of-commission for repairs for the next several months.

It looks like a sweetheart deal for KBL. The city is applying the same linear-footage charge they use for non-commerical pleasure boats one-tenth the length of these vessels.

Winter storage fees ought to be a function of area occupied, not just nominal length.

KBL will be storing its three large wedding-cake vessels for about five-months, through April 30th, for the grand-total of, get this, $4,784 plus hydro for the bubblers.

The normal folks paying over $600 in POH winter storage fees for their relatively tiny 30x10-foot sailboats can read that again.

When it comes to selling waterfront short, when is the City of Kingston not a pushover?

PRESERVE OUR WRECKS, KINGSTON was featured on the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet last week.

INADEQUACY of Wind Turbine Noise Regulations and their Application is an interesting paper recently presented by Queen's University Physics professor John P Harrison to the Annual Conference of the Canadian Acoustics Association.

It's an interesting technical read.

As you go through it, keep in mind that the Wolfe Island Wind Farm's minimum setback is only 400m.

The Ontario Government, in its recent Green Energy Act has proposed a minimum 550-metre setback from residences for wind projects involving five or fewer turbines, with greater setbacks -- up to 1,000 metres -- for projects of more than eight turbines.

Wolfe Island has 86 turbines.

Wolfe Island falls ridiculously short of the Ontario government's own proposed health and safety guidelines for wind industry development.

History already shows that Wolfe Island was a development pushover. Island leaders have a lot to answer for. And who was the Provincial Minister responsible for this? That would be Kingston's own John Gerretsen, Minister of the Environment.

We've been pwned by our own.

FISHING FOR ANSWERS OFF KINGSTON'S SHORES in today's Whig, about an ongoing geophysical survey of Charity Shoal, thought to be a meteor impact crater.

One-mile diameter Charity Shoal is 11-miles due South of Portsmouth Olympic Harbour. Most of the crater is in Canadian waters.

THE FINAL CONCEPT PLAN for Lake Ontario Park has been posted in the City's Arts, Recreation & Community Policies Committee agenda for its October 22 meeting.

MARINE MUSEUM DRYDOCK finally gets between $2M and $5M for drydock repairs. Work may start before year-end, according to The Whig.

The OCTOBER EDITION of the Thousand Islands Life e-zine is out.

Local interest articles include Howe Island Vines on local grape-growing, A Muskie Jake Tribute about Clarence (Muskie Jake) Huntley who passed away last year, and a Brian Johnson article titled Silent Rapids of Long Sault.

Also interesting is Pauls Legacy, Judys Gift, TI Gold about what's become of the late Paul Malo's extensive archives.

THE EARLY FORECAST for next spring indicates lower-than-average levels for Lake Ontario.

Bear in mind this is the fourth year in a row that early forecasts predict low-water and it hasn't turned-out that way come springtime.

HOW TO RUN A RAILROAD, Kingston-style.

You require people to register 3-weeks in advance (deadline Nov. 7th) for Saturday Nov 28th information sessions about the so-called third-crossing of the Cataraqui River.

THREE NOTABLE ITEMS on City Council's agenda for the meeting of October 6 2009.

1. Read the Recreation & Leisure Services Department 2009-2010 Priorities and observe the degree to which waterfront just isn't on the radar. What's waterfront-related is either stalled, or token.

   Waterfront items include:

   • "Design of the Breakwater beach area (2010)". The Mass Swim, the culmination of public disgust over how our waterfront is marginalized, was held July 22nd 2008.
   • "Window repairs at the Richardson Beach Bath house (2010)". That's routine deferred maintenance, long overdue, masquerading as a listable project serving the illusion of serving the waterfront.
   • "Final approval to the Lake Ontario Park Plan (November 2009)", the proximity of which signals that public outcry (also here) over the way overblown concept plan will be mostly ignored.
   • "Marinas Business Plan (February 2010)" which promises to be an eyeball-roller given all the evident shenanigans (and here) leading to that.
   • "Waterfront Plan (2010)", whatever that is. This is bundled with, and listed after items like "New outdoor rinks construction policy (2010)", "healthy food options (2010)", "Community gardens policy (November 200)", and "Sustainable food strategy (2010)". That's your Harvey-Rosen-era Kingston waterfront, right there.
2. The City gets, gratis, a narrow-strip of adjacent land to allow widening the waterfront pathway between the West Street launch ramp and Simcoe Street. That's courtesy of Holmstead Land Holdings which, rest assured, will get-that-back in spades later.
3. The 2006 agreement with the Kingston Brewing Company to operate 6 Clarence Street as a service centre for Confederation Basin Marina boaters is renewed and sweetened through 2012.

METALCRAFT reports that the FireStorm-69 fireboat they've been building for Tampa Fire Rescue has arrived.

Evidently it was an impressive sight under the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

Prior to arrival, the delivery crew spent an unscheduled night on a shallow sandbar off St-Augustine, FL.

See the MetalCraft news item for a photo and a link to a very good YouTube video of the haul-off spectacle during the following morning's rising-tide.

KYC PHOTOS now being shared on Flickr.

THE LIMITS OF SOFT CULTURAL POWER, from the September 10th edition of The Economist, about UNESCO and World Heritage Sites, which today number nearly 900.

Guarding precious and vulnerable places is one of the better things the UN's cultural agency does -- but it may topple over if it stretches too far

The article comments are interesting too. The ones pointing-out tourist-trappism certainly ring-true here.

PAUL DAVIS of Kingston, sailing with Bill and Joanne Abbott of Sarnia, won the Soling Worlds in Toronto.

It's the second Soling World Championship for a pair from the Abbott family and Paul Davis, the prior one being in 2002.

AN UNBELIEVABLY STUPID IDEA, renaming Breakwater Park after a 1758 transient who couldn't possibly lose, gets moved forward.

To be crystal clear:

Between Bradstreet's departure in 1758 and the arrival of the first surveyors in 1783, there was no European settlement at Cataraqui. The French fort and outer buildings lay in ruins and the area was of little interest until the closing of the American War of Independence.

There is no truth to the popular claim that Bradstreet helped lay the foundation of Kingston. This is not to diminish the significance of his raid or his role during the Seven Years' War, but it took another conflict and the emergence of a new military and refugee problem for the British to gave Cataraqui a new lease on life, leading to the founding of "Kingstown."

The Kingston Historical Society, unable to prevent the perpetual renanaming of Market Square after modern-day narcissists, grasps at straws for relevance.

MIXED REACTION at last night's Lake Ontario Park public meeting, from The Whig.

THE SEPTEMBER THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is up.

It includes an article about the iconic Willow Island.

THE LAKE ONTARIO PARK RAILROAD rolls-on at a September 16th public meeting.

By now the recurring pattern is plainly evident:

1. Defer maintenance of a municipal asset for decades.
2. Spend megabucks on an one-time, ostentatious remediation plan.
3. Repeat.

Previously: Paving paradise, to put up a 'fake' park from July, and How to run a railroad from last March.

SAM LAZIER, a truly great friend of our waterfront, passed away earlier this week. He was 83 years old.

Funeral today at 2 PM at at St. George's Cathedral. Donations for those wishing may be made to the Kingston Marine Museum.

THE GREAT CANADIAN SHORELINE CLEANUP goes-down on Saturday September 19th at 9:00 am.

Kingston's official shoreline cleanup locations include

• Breakwater Park and MacDonald Memorial Park
• Doug Fluhrer Park, on the Cataraqui River
• Marine Museum of the Great Lakes Shoreline and Dry Dock.

The official website appears very officious, with allusions that signing-up is required.

Don't be put-off by that. It's probably because they need to plan for the number of t-shirts, clipboards for the always-interesting tallies, garbage-bags, pick-up logistics, and whatnot.

Just show-up. If they don't have a TD-Bank-branded t-shirt for you, that's tough. It's well-worth doing. The area around the Marine Museum in particular needs some TLC.

Or, you could just grab a couple of green garbage bags and some gloves, don your boots, and head-down to your favorite stretch and make it a little better. Any day.

See photos from past cleanups. It looks like fun. The people you'll meet are all givers.

DROWNING IN SIMPLE-MINDEDNESS, great article by Andrew Coyne in MacLeans' Magazine in August.

IDIOTIC BEACH REPORT from the KFLA Public Health Unit.

Go ahead, read it.

Who writes this crap? Who is it written-for? Er, which beaches are open, or closed, or what? This is bullshit.

Hey, KFLA Public Health unit, give us obvious in-context links to the complete list of beaches in the KFLA area posted as unsafe for swimmers.

Just like that.

Not long confusing link-free paragraphs then, far from there, a link that doesn't-look-like-a-link, out-of-context, which few people will scroll-to and find, and fewer will click. Can you find it? Look again.

Seriously, how hard could that be? This is so basic.

This isn't news. For too long the KFLA Public Health Unit has been an embarassment to our waterfront.

Dr Ian Gemill, enough self-serving verbiage about beaches. Do us a favour: either clean-house or retire.

Just as summer holidays are over.

LIST OF MAJOR REGATTAS IN KINGSTON has just been updated with CORK results from the past week.

This year is notable because it's apparently the first time sailors from Asia have won major regattas here.

Terence Choo from Singapore won the Byte CII Canadians and, just this week Darren Choy, also from Singapore, won the Byte CII Worlds. Actually, Singapore dominated both events, placing four sailors in the top-5 in both events.

IAN BRUCE featured in The Whig yesterday.

GEOFF WEBSTER HAS NOW POSTED 801 CORK PHOTOS, and he's evidently not done. We're barely passed the halfway point.

See photos from the Hobie-16 North Americans (57 shots) in July, and more recently CORK INT (256 shots) and CORK OCR (488 shots and counting), all on Smugmug.com.

Web 2.0, meet CORK.

AIRHEADS MANAGING OUR WATERFRONT in today's Whig.

At Lemoine Point, an orange lifesaving ring and rope hang from a steel post below a sign.

The sign warns that swimming is unsupervised and cautions that "strong winds and high waves cause dangerous conditions."

The sign and ring, however, are located roughly 100 metres from the waterfront, next to the gravel access road at the north end of the conservation area.

BILL STEENBAKKERS, a Kingston waterfront pioneer who passed-away earlier this month, was the subject of a 1972 Kingston Whig-Standard article about the founding of Collins Bay Marina.

Reading the article, evidently Bill Steenbakkers' original vision for the marina remains intact nearly forty years later.

The suceess of Collins Bay Marina was never assured -- it's interesting that there were already two other marinas on the Bay when Collins Bay Marina was built.

CORK 2009 PHOTOS are being posted by Geoff Webster. What's great is these can be zoomed to various sizes and the quality of the photos, regardless of size, is amazing.

Day-1 photos are all from the Byte C-II Canadian Championships.

Also, CORK IS STILL LOOKING FOR VOLUNTEERS. There are many different volunteer jobs available for sailors and non-sailors alike. Get out and have some fun! Contact the CORK office for more information: 613.545.1322 / sail@cork.org / www.cork.org.

CORK 2009 gets underway in earnest today.

There's been zero-fuss about this, but this year is CORK's 40th anniversary.

The first four days are all about youth development classes. There's one Canadian Championship at stake, in the Byte CII class.

But starting Sunday August 23rd, the focus shifts to older sailors, with one World Championship, four North American Championships, and one Canadian Championship at stake.

Here's how the whole summer shakes-out compared to past years'. Kinston's never hosted so many North American Championships before.

PLEASURE CRAFT OPERATOR CARD TESTING, a government scam if ever there was, is available at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes on Thursdays.

You have four weeks left to get yours. The deadline is September 15, 2009.

Email Ian Hood, the museum's congenial test proctor, to book yourself in.

The last time this happened was in February and, back then, these Environment Canada forecasts looked-ahead only 5-days.

BILL STEENBAKKERS, patriarch of Collins Bay Marina which he founded in 1971, passed away on Sunday. He was 82 years old.

CALLING ALL MARINE MUSEUM AND ALEXANDER HENRY FRIENDS - Plan to join us for a taste of 'Icebreaker Ale' on Monday, 17 August 2009, beginning at 6 pm, upstairs at the Kingston Brew Pub, 34 Clarence Street.

The Kingston Brewing Company has very generously agreed to brew a celebratory libation for the Alexander Henry's 50th, and it will be unveiled/untapped, or whatever one does to launch a beer, on the 17th. Fifty cents from the purchase of each glass of Icebreaker Ale will be donated to the Marine Museum.

POKER RUN PARTICIPANTS DEFEND EVENT in today's Whig.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR POKER RUNS AMERICA BOATS makes for interesting reading.

You have to call it for what this truly is: a gig monopolized into four downtown hotels -- Radisson, Holiday Inn, Confederation Place Hotel and Four Points Sheraton -- all of these are owned by the usual suspects.

Most meals and the entertainment package appear to be monopolized into those four hotels as well.

Read the whole thing.

LAKE ONTARIO WATER LEVELS are currently above average, almost exactly where they were last year at this time.

The good news is the big-lakes upstream are replenishing. You may recall that upper-lake levels were bleak back in 2007. Lake Superior was about 18" below average in August 2007 and Lakes Michigan and Lake Huron were about 23" below average in December 2007.

Lake Superior has been, for most of the summer, above last-year's levels, generally about 5 to 7" below its long-term average levels. Lakes Michigan and Huron are a full 5 to 10" above last summer's levels, and currently within 6" of long-term averages.

More history in the K7 Water Levels topic.

229 PHOTOS from last weekend's Cassidys Bay International-14 Regatta.

Did you know... volunteering to help run sailing regattas is a great way to get yourself on-water, or involved shore-side, and it's a ton of fun too.

TOKEN PARK DETAILS have been published.

Note the tumble-rock perimiter. No connection to water whatsoever. Why???

All this sits behind the massive Confederation Basin tumble-rock breakwall already! A breakwall behind a breakwall; Brilliant!

The effing idiots who have screwed-up our waterfront for decades haven't learned a damn thing.

Read more on Token Park.

UPDATES from the KYC Race Team:

• Mid Ontarios
• Laser and Radial Training Camp
• 29er Canadians and Clinic

GEOFF WEBSTER, longtime local sailing photographer, has just placed 23 photos from the 2009 Soling Bath Bowl and 57 photos from the Hobie-16 youth NA's online.

RESULTS from the 2009 Shark Canadian championships, hosted by KYC, are posted.

Also the K7 List Of Major Regattas In Kingston has been updated.

PHOTOS from the 2009 29er Canadian Championships and the 2009 Hobie-16 North Americans have been posted to Flickr.

Here are the 29er Canadian Championship results. Danielle Boyd of Kingston, sailing with Emily Hill, finished third, ending the 10-race regatta with three bullets. Ellie Clark and Rachael Boyd of Kingston finished 8th in the 26-boat fleet.

THE HOBIE-16 NA'S ARE DONE and Enrique Figueroa with crew Victor Aponte of Puerto Rico won-it convincingly.

Up next: the 29er Canadian Championships hosted by KYC on Saturday and Sunday.

HOW MANY COLOURFUL CATS do you think are required to make some people realize that there's a championship competition going on, and so it might be sensible to stay clear?

Below, some wanker in a large cruising sailboat, crossing, blanketing, and eventually splitting a 54-boat Hobie 16 North American Championship fleet a few moments after the start of race 2.

Other than that, the championship is going-off pretty well. Some more wind would be nice. Today (Monday) was saved by the usual Kingston Harbour sea breeze.

VERY TIGHT 3-WAY TIE after day-1 at the Hobie 16 Women's North American Championship, and similarly there's a two-way tie at the top of the Youth division.

EIGHT DAYS OF HOT CATS IN THE HARBOUR starting Friday as the 39th Hobie 16 North American Championship takes-over.

The event is hosted by CORK and sailed out of the Portsmouth Olympic Harbor.

The event starts with three days of racing for the Youth and Women's Championship followed by five days of racing for the Open Championship.

Competitors from six countries and eleven US states will take part in the event. The entry list includes five former Olympians and four past Hobie 16 North American Champions. The defending champions from Puerto Rico, Francisco Figueroa and Jolliam Berrios, will be defending their title.

FILM REVIEW of Waterlife, a documentary by Kevin McMahon. Grim.

EXCELLENT PHOTOSET (Kiteboarding).

COMMENT ONLINE on the city website about the proposed renaming of Breakwater Park in honor of Lt.-Col John Bradstreet.

Renaming the park after John Bradstreet is a stupid idea. Here's why:

• Bradstreet's troop-strength ratio was about 25-to-1, a significant fact the city never mentions in its 'comment-online' background information.
• Bradstreet's troops quickly took Fort Frontenac, trashed it, then they departed.
• Bradstreet never spent a single eighteenth-century winter here.
• There's no evidence John Bradstreet ever built a damn thing here.

Any questions? See the Battle of Fort Frontenac and John Bradstreet's 2-paragraph article in Wikipedia.

THE 8-PAGE SUMMER 2009 NEWSLETTER from Preserve Our Wrecks Kingston is now available.

PAVING PARADISE, TO PUT UP A FAKE PARK is an interesting letter in the recent Kingston This Week about the proposed extensive Lake Ontario Park re-vamp.

ELEVATOR BAY DEVELOPMENT STUCK IN LIMBO in today's Whig.

A cursory check of City Planning Committee agendas shows the project has been in abeyance for quite some time. In other words, documents have not been filed.

Here are some photos of that proposed (er, stalled) development.

OFFICER OF THE ORDER OF CANADA announced today for Ian Bruce of Dorval, QC.

For his contributions to the sport of sailing in Canada and abroad, notably for the design and development of high-performance crafts for young sailors.

OC is the 2nd highest rank. That's the same level among sportsmen as the likes of Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Steve Podborski, and Alex Bauman so this is a very big deal.

Update: Nice summary of Ian Bruce's career courtesy of the Montreal Sailing blog.

FOUR DEAD AT KINGSTON MILLS in a car discovered in a lock Tuesday morning that was finally hoisted-out on Tuesday evening. More at CKWS-TV and The Whig also here and here.

As of 9:15 AM today there has still been no boat traffic through Kingston Mills locks since yesterday morning.

DAVID TYNER, a talented photographer who has contributed fifteen K7Waterfront homepage photos over the past two years, has moved to Ottawa.

David is a wizard of night photography (among other things) and he will be missed!

Thanks David!

Above: photo of, and by, David Tyner.

UNGENTLEMANLY CONDUCT via Preserve Our Wrecks, Kingston.

KINGSTON'S ROBERT DAVIS FINISHED 12TH at the Laser North American Championships over the weekend.

(The results page is a mess and you may need to scroll to the table that lists all 10 races scored.)

Does anybody know what this US Coast Guard vessel, and a barge, are doing at KPH?

One guess: it's the only available wharf in-town?

Hopefully this is just Environment Canada, low-balling the forecast, as they tend to.

THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL today filmed a segment about the archeological work going-on in Kingston harbour.

DIVING INTO THE PAST in today's Whig, about the archeological work going-on in Kingston harbour.

See also CKWS-TV'S JUNE 4th REPORT, with video.

THE FINAL CONCEPT PLAN FOR LAKE ONTARIO PARK has been released by the City.

More here.

YEARS OF DEFERRED MAINTENANCE has come to the point of requiring a public meeting about a small stretch of Kingston Waterfront.

The designs, to be implemented this summer, are the subject of an upcoming public information session on Monday, June 22, at 6:30 p.m. in Memorial Hall at City Hall, 216 Ontario St., and are now posted for review at www.cityofkingston.ca/waterfront/.

The improvements are moving forward based on the City's Waterfront Strategy now part of Kingston's Recommended Draft Official Plan (cityofkingston.ca/officialplan/).

We can't find any reference to this area of waterfront in Kingston's Recommended Draft Official Plan.

Here are some photos of the area taken from the water.

It looks like this has turned-into a major piece of work that can't be deferred any longer and will involve the closure of the West Street Launch Ramp for a period of time this summer.

Here's the deal: Instead of decades of neglect, how about regular required and preventive maintenance? Instead of doing nearly nothing for decades, why not fix problems as they occur? Each spring, improve things a little bit. After a major storm, go down and check if anything washed-away. If so, fix it immediately.

Above: this is what gabion walls eventually look like when you don't maintain them.

As things appear now, with respect to the waterfront, Kingston's official plan isn't about better waterfront living or even clawing back what we've recently lost. The official plan is apparently more about doing obvious repairs, merely fixing things that should never have been permitted to remain broken in the first place.

WATERFRONT ACCESSIBILITY DOWNGRADE according to a moronic report to Council last Tuesday night.

Get this:

Other City owned locations used by the public for swimming but not designated for swimming includes [sic]: Esplanade Park, Everitt Park, Patterson Park and Confederation Park..... In non-designated swimming areas the signs will indicate that swimming is not permitted. Both designated and non-designated swimming areas will restrict certain activities, such as diving, due the potential. [sic]

Swimming flat-out prohibited at Esplanade Park, Everitt Park, and Patterson Park. Can you imagine?

City Hall in the Harvey Rosen era is led by idiots!

THE JUNE 2009 THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is up.

Check out the terrific article titled The Wolfe Islander Is Missing, by current ferry captain Brian Johnson, about a gale in January 1950. Read the whole thing.

DOWNTOWN POKER RUN PLUG-UP planned between Friday Aug 7th at noon to Sunday Aug 9 at 6 PM.

Expect our spineless, gutless council to approve this.

Here's a summary of Poker Run-related news items here on K7 going back to 2006.

THERE'S APPARENTLY NO IMPROVEMENT since last July to the so-called "Beach Report" we're getting from the Health Unit.

What's worse, it's nearly mid-June and the City of Kingston is still not listing beach quality information, or links to beach quality information, on its Environment or Recreation landing pages.

The main problem with our Health Unit's Beach Report remains the lack of disclosure which is in stark contrast with the quality of beach information other areas are getting.

Here's the data we need to see:

• The exact date the sample was collected.
• The specific level of E.coli found, as they do in Hastings & Prince Edward Counties and Toronto.
• How, exactly, was the sample collected? Was it from a boat perhaps hundreds of feet off-the-beach, or within a few yards of the waterline where children actually swim?
• The sampling history for each location so the propensity and volatility of E.coli contamination can be reckoned.

Because just "Open" or "Closed" isn't nearly good enough.

CKWS-TV'S JUNE 4th REPORT about the Kingston Harbour wreck that made news last summer. (Via Preserve Our Wrecks Kingston.)

MARINA WORLD has a really (really) great feature on Kingston's Collins Bay Marina in it's latest issue.

Wow.

Check-out either just the article or the impressive full-issue (8 MB) online.

THE SNOWBIRDS PATROLLED SAFETY ZONE in Kingston Harbour is unchanged this year.

This year's 45-minute show goes-off on Wednesday May 27th at exactly 6 p.m.

Here's the Snowbirds' website

ON ICE: ALEXANDER HENRY AT FIFTY is a new Marine Museum exhibit which opens tomorrow, Sunday May 24th, at 2 pm.

Guest speaker Captain Patrick Toomey, one of Canada's top marine ice experts, will speak about the Alexander Henry, the Canadian Coast Guard and the challenges of navigating in ice.

FINALLY the Whig publishes something about the pain surrounding the Belle Harbour / Morch Marine receivership in Belleville.

If the article is to be believed, apparently BDO Dunwoody has a harbour's worth of boat owners pissed-off at them, and now you know all about it too.

AFTER A FEW DAYS AWAY sailing on Lake Erie including a transit through a sadly delapidated and disfunctional Welland Canal, some catching-up:

• Morch Marine in Belleville, in its more-recent incarnation as a condo development corporation, is belly-up. The latest: at least boat owners were able to finally launch and get out-of-there.

• Kingston's stalled beach dossier from The Whig on Wednesday. Some great comments from readers too.

• Funding for the Tett Centre appears to be coming together.

  Looking at the concept drawing of a water-side perspective, there's apparently zero direct water-accessibility in the plans. One of Kingston's best shore-dives lies just off the property.

LEMOINE POINT CONSERVATION AREA now has a Wikipedia page, thanks to the initiative of a user named SoftwareSimian, who created the page yesterday. This is great!

Whenever you Google something, have you noticed that Wikipedia always ranks very high in the list of returned results?

Wikipedia is highly authoritative in the eyes of Google. This means that if a Google search returns a million results, Wikipedia's entry is typically in the top-10, sometimes top-5.

Kingston's Waterfront continues to have a Wikipedia deficit. That needs to change.

If you care about something, document it. That, in and of itself, makes it harder for the clueless among us to mess with it.

THE SITE PLAN FOR TOKEN PARK goes before the City Planning Committee on Thursday night.

Highlights:

• No shoreline access. It's tumble-rock shoreline. Like we don't have enough of that.
• No jetty access. The Confedration Basin breakwall remains a birds-only place.
• A spot reserved for a marina building which makes no sense at all.

Related: Token Park news archive.

THE MAY ISSUE OF THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is online.

A RICHARDSON BEACH UPDATE is on the Council agenda for next Tuesday. 12-pages in all.

The words "windsurf" and "sail", and any reference to current users of the beach, appear exactly zero-times.

So the railroad is running perfectly. How perfectly? The consultant's report is dated April 9th. What's a five-week disclosure delay when you and your plans aren't accountable to anyone in particular?

Oh, and the plan changes drastically. You thought maybe the old plan wasn't windsurfer-friendly? Here's the new (5-week-old) schematic.

This much appears certain: another summer will pass with no beach improvements in Kingston.

DontRockTheBoat.ca is the website for the annual Don't Rock the Boat Event, this year on May 23rd, at Collins Bay Marina.

TWO EXCELLENT LETTERS this week in The Whig:

• Get serious about going green and cancel the Poker Run from Norm Macintosh, and
• City should withdraw support for 'sordid' Poker Run from Guy Oram of SPLASH Kingston.

Here's a summary of Poker Run-related news items here on K7 going back to 2006.

See also the articles in this Whig-Standard search on 'Poker Run'.

MAYORS WANT GREAT LAKES BEACHES PROMOTED according to a report released today.

Here is a link to the 44-page report which, take note, isn't provided by any of the online "professional" mainstream media "covering" this today.

It's a 5-point plan.

1. Create a Municipal-Provincial-Federal Great Lakes Table.
2. Improve and promote beaches, natural areas, wetlands, trails and tourism.
3. Attack nuisance and toxic algae.
4. Reduce untreated sewage and stormwater discharges entering the great lakes, especially in light of climate change and technical innovations.
5. Build a business case and measure results from Great Lakes investments.

There may be no better way to strengthen the public's connection to the Great Lakes than to enhance and promote beaches and other shoreline activities such as wetlands, natural areas and trails. Drawing more people to the shoreline can also boost local economies and contribute to healthier lifestyles. With a greater share of Great Lakes shoreline than any other jurisdiction, it makes sense to promote Ontario as a major beach and shoreline destination.

One wonders about Harvey Rosen's role in all this.

When it comes to waterfront around here, it's been absolutely all-downhill during his tenure.

One can easily imagine Harvey Rosen, a minority dissenter, clinging instead to some half-baked plan to siphon more tax-dollars for his cronies Downtown.

Beaches? Trails? Parks and wetlands? Harvey Rosen? Please!

Remember this scene from the July 22 2008 Mass Swim (also here)? The event sought to raise awareness about our woefully neglected beaches.

All signs indicate that 2009 will be another summer woeful beach maintenance, woeful beach safety reporting (also here), and more of the usual Kingston recreational infrastruture degradation.

Scroll this page for the full-story on Kingston's beaches since 2006.

TWO SEPARATE REPORTS from last weekend's apparently very successful Nautical Archaeology course.

It's good to see such a strong level of interest in this.

KINGSTON ROWING CLUB'S 2009 PROGRAMS have been posted. Better late than never.

SWEET DEAL, CONTINUED at Crawford Wharf and Confederation Park for Kingston and the Islands Boat Lines.

SMALL VESSEL REGULATIONS are being re-vamped. The Canada Gazette published the Small Vessel Regulations on April 25th. There is a 30 day comment period which ends May 25.

Here are some of the notable changes in the pleasure craft section of the proposed regulations:

• A heavy-duty a marine emergency first-aid kit will be required.
• Fire extinguishers will only be acceptable for a period of 6 years after date of manufacture.
• Only Canadian approved PFDs and/or lifejackets are allowed - this is currently the case, a fine point that many don't realize.
• A copy of a boat license must be on board. (This assumes a proper boat licensing system)
• Boat licenses will have to renewed every 10 years.
• If you are under 16, your lifejacket must be inherently buoyant (disallowing inflatables?)
• You will need to have a magnetic compass.
• They are making changes in the different size categories.
  • currently: <6, 6<8, 8<12m (3-categories)
  • proposed: <6, 6<9, 9<12, 12<24m (4-categories)

Read the proposed new regulations.

AT COUNCIL TONIGHT, one of the In Camera items:

(b) Advice that is subject to solicitor-client privilege, including communications necessary for that purpose - Clean-up of contaminated sites in the Inner Harbour

Anybody know what this might be about? The dump? Rosen-lands? Third-crossing-related?

COLLINS BAY MARINA is again first in the region to commence serious boat launching operations.

This is just 5-days later than in 2006 which was the earliest-ever launch.

HERE'S THE LINEUP of exhibitors for the Kingston Boat Show this upcoming weekend at the Cataraqui Community Centre.

The number of exhibitors appears down somewhat, but not nearly as much as you might expect.

For comparison, here's last-year's K7 news item about the 2008 show, and the Official 2008 exhibitor's list is still online.

What's different this year? Commercially the show appears nearly as strong as last year. The difference between 2008 and 2009 is almost entirely due to local marinas, clubs and several non-profit organizations who are no-shows this year.

A NAUTICAL ARCHEOLOGY COURSE is being hosted by Preserve Our Wrecks Kingston on May 2-3 at the Military Sportsplex.

More information available from info@powkingston.org or by calling 613-767-7446

HOLLY MORRISON is apparently the new Acting Supervisor of Kingston's municipal marinas, replacing Ed Leeman.

First-ever report from diving at the HIGHWAY 15 (CRUICKSHANK) QUARRY.

ART PARK and ENVIRO PARK concept plans for Lake Ontario Park have (finally) been posted by the City.

See the City's project page. For now it's just diagrams, no details.

THE HIGHWAY 15 DIVE QUARRY is Kingston's newest recreational dive site.

The quarry also known as Pittsburgh quarry and Cruickshank quarry is just north of Gore Rd on Highway 15. It has a gravel bottom and crystal clear water. It is fairly well protected from any wind. It will be open for all types of diving and people are encouraged to come and enjoy the site for relaxation and training.

LOCAL SHIP TRAFFIC, live and online.

For the moment in the region it's just the Wolfe Islander III and the tug Vigilant I which is in-service on the Wolfe Island wind project.

You can zoom-out and pan to the St-Lawrence Seaway, whose activity is rapidly picking-up since yesterday's seaway opening at Montreal.

GRASPING AT STRAWS for Kingston waterfront promotion.

HOW TO RUN A RAILROAD. All aboard! The Lake Ontario Park express.

First you have a public meeting and THEN you post proposal details online.

This guarantees minimum buzz prior to the meeting, a low turnout, and uninformed attendees at the meeting itself.

All the better to ram-through pre-conceived plans with a minimum disruption like actual input.

This is how the people who have fucked-up our waterfront operate.

Related: The City's token 4-question online LOP survey from last January.

The QUEEN'S PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE DESIGN was unveiled earlier this week. According to The Whig, it's quite something.

A thoughtful reader points out that plans are unclear about its waterfront aspects. The waterfront here has long been a neighborhood and community park for the launch of kayaks, swimmers, windsurfers and scuba divers both east and west of the Stella Buck Building.

Now this area is controlled by Queen's. Here's hoping this doesn't turn into yet another loss of accessibility to the residents of Kingston.

Considering the number of CFB Kingston Scuba Club blog posts tagged with 'Tett Centre', this site is used 12-months a year, day or night, and it's evidently one of the nicer shore dive locations in the Kingston region.

Wouldn't it be great to see active waterfront accessibility built-into the project?

ON TUESDAY'S COUNCIL AGENDA is the City Marinas Sustainable Strategy and Business Plan whose weeks-delayed public release was thoroughly botched last month following its truly bizarre August 2006 inception as a suspiciously narrowly-circulated RFI.

(Hey, you have to agree: it's a great way to run a railroad.)

FINALLY, for perhaps the first time in the seemingly endless Harvey Rosen era, Kingston waterfront takes a step that's NOT downright stupid, or ridiculously over-hyped, or shamefully stalled, or dirigiste, or laughably incomplete, or botched, or totally wasted, or commandeered by a raving bo-bo or otherwise seriously retrograde.

This bucks the unmistakable trend:

THAT the recommendation for the relocation of the Coast Guard at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour be exempted from the above clauses, and that it be referred back to staff for review and reconsideration in light of the community concerns raised within correspondence and through a delegation to the Committee on behalf of the Portsmouth Villagers Community Association.

Hallelujah.

Related: Anne Milina Outlook Point, the waterfront park that stands to be clobbered by said Coast Guard relocation.

LAKE ONTARIO SPRING WATER LEVELS are looking good after a winter with lots of precipitation in the Great Lakes Basin.

That's good because last November's forecast was bleak. The latest forecasts are a full-foot above that.

If water levels matter to you, don't miss the International St. Lawrence River Board of Control public teleconference tomorrow (Tuesday) between 7:00-8:30 pm.

INFORMATION KIT from SPLASH, or "Sustainable Practices Leave A Sustainable Heritage", the group that seeks to reset Kingston about, among other things, the annual Poker Run.

More background on this here and there's a Facebook group you can and should join in support.

BIG BREEZE TODAY was the tipping point for ice-breakup in Kingston Harbour.

See these photos courtesy of Frances O'Neill of ice floes pushed-up on the shore at KYC.

Look closely: the ice pushed-up a large part of the rocky beach.

UPDATE: See also these photos from Chris Walmsley, also taken at KYC, including this one of the ice crumpling an iron fence. The photos also show yesterday's wind graph which peaks at 100 KM/H (60 MPH on the graph).

UPDATE: All this is reminiscent of this scene on February 17 2006, only this year is worse because thick ice floes are far more damaging than water. Peak wind on that day was 84 KM/H.

ANNE MILINA OUTLOOK POINT is the newest and possibly tinyest of Kingston's waterfront parks.

It sits on the southeastern edge of Portsmouth Olympic Harbour on land formerly controlled by Corrections Canada. It was opened in June 2008.

The point is also known as Hatters Bay Park

The recently released consultant's report, titled Kingston Marinas Sustainability and Development Strategy and Business Plan says this about the the Coast Guard building that sits on the Western edge of the POH property.

Current Coast Guard building inadequate for their needs considering relocation to east side of harbour at Hadders (sic) Bay Park.

Among the plan's recommendations for POH is number 7:

Recommendation POH7 : Collaborate with the Coast Guard to develop and implement a plan for relocating and enlarging their land-based facilities and berth, while relocating Hatters Bay Park to current Coast Guard location at southwest corner of site.

Financial Implications: Minimal or no cost to City of Kingston.

Timing: Q4 2008- Q2 2009 (sic)

Understandably, clobbering a beautiful waterfront park and moving it to a concrete-surrounded petrol-station-sign-dominated place in the shadow of tall condo buildings has folks in Portsmouth Village a little disturbed.

But more to the point, according to the consultant, all this is supposed to happen at minimal or no cost to City of Kingston.

• Build a new house-sized structure, and running services to it,
• build a parking lot at the new structure,
• build substantial new berths for coast guard vessels on the East-side of POH,
• pave and perpetually clear and maintain the road to the new structure,
• demolish a smaller but still house-sized structure, and rip-up the extisting Coast Guard area and turn that into a "park".

Right!

It's a really stupid idea on so many levels. Still, it's out-there, floating-around as someone's bright idea for our waterfront.

Nevermind that there's no other publicly accessible waterfront between there and Breakwater Park, a full 1.2 kilometers to the east, as the crow flies.

GROUP LOBBIES COUNCIL TO CANCEL POKER RUN from last Thursday's edition of Kingston EMC.

The Poker Run is obnoxious, and its promoter is full-of-himself. Read the whole thing. Yeah, we know, it's all about money. Now please take your freakshow elsewhere.

PRESERVE OUR WRECKS' Spring newsletter is out.

NORTH BLOCK CONCEPT SKETCHES have been posted over at KCAL. These are larger and more accessible and comparable than the buried, popup-obfuscated ones posted by the City.

This city only seems to have "vision", for what that's worth, if it involves the downtown and, specifically, land owners who shilled and shelled for the mayor at the last election.

Meanwhile, another summer approaches with zero apparent progress on waterfront accessibility, no reversal of the unmistakable trend.

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT LAUNCHED FOR THE THIRD CROSSING of the Cataraqui River.

NATHAN BARON is back ashore in Miami after finishing a 1000-mile solo sail from Miami around the Bahamas, and back.

PAUL WASH has just posted a photo sequence of the lifting and installation of the blades and hub assembly on a Siemens wind turbine on Wolfe Island.

As Paul suggests, in Flickr click the "all sizes" icon and view the largest versions available.

The last time this happened was in late-August.

Update 3:16 PM: Finally a readable version of the City Marina Business Plan (57 pages, 12 Mb PDF) is posted by the web-bozos at the City of Kingston. It's an incomplete posting, lacking appendices.

Update 7:00 PM: Here's the original sloppy version (164 pages, 7 Mb PDF) first posted by the City. At least this one contains the appendices. It's just ridiculous how the public gets waxed by the systematic incompetence of the City of Kingston Communications Department.

The communications bozos at the City of Kingston have posted a sloppily-scanned borderline unreadable City Marina report.

I'm trying to obtain a readable version to post.

The report is dated January 5th. The City Committee meeting is tomorrow night. This smells exactly like the folks we all know running their usual railroad.

The screwing-up of Kingston's Waterfront is apparently continuing unabated. Early public participation and input in waterfront-related processes is clearly not in the cards, and marinas is no exception. Quite the opposite, evidently.

CITY CONSIDERING UPGRADES TO ITS MARINAS in today's Whig.

Contrary to what's printed in The Whig, the "the full consultant's report" is not online. Here's the four-page fluff-intro, which is all the city has released for now.

ST. LAWRENCE II - 2009 SUMMER SAILING SCHEDULE is posted.

IT'S OFFICIAL Kingston is not the sailing venue in the Toronto 2015 Pan American games bid.

AWESOME ICE BOATING CONDITIONS, according to those who know. Good skating too.

Be careful out there.

CHECK OUT THESE PHOTOS of winter kiteboarding here in Kingston, posted by Kiteboarding Kingston.

More than ever, Kingston waterfront is active all year long.

The K7 LIST OF MAJOR REGATTAS IN KINGSTON has just received a major functional upgrade.

You can now filter and search the list on any phrase you choose.

Kingston has hosted some 160 major events, defined as national championship or higher, over the past 35-years.

THE FEBRUARY 2009 THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is online. It appears to be a most excellent issue, with lots of Canadian content and great photographs throughout.

Articles include The MacNair Forty-Acre Muskie about the recently celebrated world-record catch-and-release by Dale MacNair. There's an article about The Canadian Empress, a very interesting article about Winter Island Living, and an article about Snowsqualls that explains how nearby Pulaski NY gets so thoroughly buried each winter.

Important News for Brockville breaks very recent news about a Brockville waterfront condo development landing a government-goodie in the form of a two-thirds funding of a new $18M Maritime Discovery Centre. (Incidentally, reading this, how does Kingston's Token Park sit with you now?)

KINGSTON'S 2009 REGATTA PICTURE is firming-up and it looks really good.

This summer sees Kingston host The Byte CII World Championship and seven North American Championships including three from Olympic classes: Hobie 16 (women, youth, and open), Finn, 470, 29er, and 49er class sailboats.

Here's how 2009 shapes-up compared to previous years in the number of prestigious championship events hosted.

More details in our list of major regattas in Kingston.

ANNOUNCEMENT BY SAVE ONTARIO SHIPWRECKS (SOS) that it has formed a partnership with the Nautical Archaeology Society of Portsmouth UK to deliver maritime archaeology education programs developed by the society.

A committee of instructors has been established. Training will begin in 2009. SOS aims to provide opportunities for training across the province.

Save Ontario Shipwrecks is a Provincial Heritage Organization dedicated to the study, preservation and promotion of an appreciation of Ontario's marine heritage.

THE SNOWBIRDS AIR SHOW is coming to Kingston on Wednesday, May 27th.

DEVELOPER DONATES $200,000 TO THE MARINE MUSEUM in today's Whig.

Update: apparently the Whig muffed the headline and the first paragraph of the story. The money isn't donated to the museum, it's earmarked for upgrading the dock, which is federally-owned.

PAN AM BID AIMS TO CONCENTRATE ON SUBURBS in today's National Post.

Toronto is lending its name recognition to the $1.7-billion bid backed by the provincial and federal governments, but events will be staged across the Golden Horseshoe region, from St. Catharines to Hamilton, to Barrie to Oshawa.

Which exactly matches what we've been hearing all along, and more recently from those in-the-know around the Toronto 2015 Pan American Games bid.

So Kingston's definitely left on the outside, looking-in.

TWO WEEKS AGO, ON JANUARY 13TH the City of Kingston allegedly dumped 10 million litres of sewage into the St-Lawrence River during a power failure in the City's East end.

That's enough sewage to completely fill 280 of these wholesale-sized tanker trailers.

Here's a Whig article about it.

But there is still nothing tallied on the crappy Utilities Kingston sewer bypass log. Not even a note.

Jim Keech is President and CEO of Utilities Kingston. Mr Keech is well-aware of this and other past disclosure shenanigans by Utilities Kingston.

When you think of sewage in our waterways, and the health of Kingston waterfront, think of Jim Keech and Utilities Kingston. And remember: these are the same folks responsible for getting safe drinking water to your tap.

Related:

• 10-million litres of sewage were dumped into the St-Lawrence River on Tuesday January 13, 2009.
• Jim Keech, president of Utilities Kingston, must think we're all stupid from July 8, 2008.
• Pollution disclosure, City of Kingston-style from April 10 2008.
• Massive sewage dumping from April 4 2008.
• Past sewage overflow reports have been understated from September 21 2007.
• We need better sewer bypass accounting from November 21 2006.

AMHERST ISLAND IS NOT LISTED among six new wind projects announced for Ontario on Friday.

The closest to us is the proposed 64.5 MW Byran Wind Project in central Prince Edward County.

Does it seem bizarre that the announcement, totalling almost 500 MW in rated-capacity, is couched foremostly as a job creation initiative?

About the announcement, quoting the Amherst Island Wind Info website:

I assume the next RFP will have to pretty much start the process from scratch, as new proponents will be entering the bidding process. Hopefully this will take a year or so; the OPA hasn't announced its schedule yet.

TORONTO 2015 TO UNVEIL PAN AM BID PLAN SHORTLY, according to GamesBids.com.

Kingston is still in-the-hunt for the sailing events, though all the bid chatter continues to emphasize the "Golden Horseshoe" aspect of the bid.

But sailing is specialized-enough, quirky-enough, and sufficiently under-the-radar to be quietly extracted from there, and hosted in undisputedly the best venue: here in Kingston.

Related: This from October 23rd and this from November 10th.

WORLD RECORD MUSKIE CATCH and its subsequent release are the subject of two interesting Whig articles this week.

Dale MacNair caught and released the 65-pound female muskellunge, measuring 57 inches with a girth of 33 inches, by the 40-Acres Shoal in November.

It's the largest catch-and-release muskie, and second-largest overall, ever. She's still out-there.

KYC WINS THREE TOP AWARDS at the Ontario Sailing awards presented at the Toronto Boatshow on Sunday January 18th.

• Robert Davis is the Youth Athlete of the Year, for the 2nd year in a row.
• Sam Crothers wins the Angus (Bud) Roulstone Leadership Award, presented to a certified CYA Instructor/Coach who has shown exceptional leadership in a learn-to-sail or racing program. This is the 2nd year in a row that a KYC-based instructor has won this award.
• The Kingston Yacht Club wins the Unistrut Central Youth Performance Ranking Trophy, presented to the Club with the Best Results in the 16 & Under Ontario Sailing Provincial Youth Regatta Series.

Also the 2009 Canadian Youth Sailing Team has just been named and, of the 26 sailors named, 7 of them -- that's over a quarter of our National Team -- call Kingston Yacht Club either home or their training centre.

These sailors are:

• Robert Davis, Laser class
• Tom Ramshaw, Laser class
• Charlotte Skinner, Laser Radial class
• Samantha Rea, Laser Radial class
• Peter and Paul Evhert, 29er Class
• Danielle Boyd, 29er class

THE LATEST OFFICIAL PLAN for the City of Kingston contains much related to waterfront in its 35 PDF documents and hundreds of pages.

We're fast approaching the plan's "consultation" period, for what that's worth.

Looking through all the documents for its waterfront-related aspects, there are numerous general mentions of the recreational uses of our waterfront. Considering the vast majority of kingstonians have no meaningful relationship with the waterfront beyond the occasional glimpse, it all rings hollow.

The plan goes nowhere beyond cliches and platitudes as far as recreational waterfront is concerned.

For example, in the hundreds of pages of the plan, the words Swim, Sail, Row or Rowing, SCUBA, or Diving never appear. The word Wreck appears several times, always in reference to wrecking yards.

The word Beach appears just once in reference to Richardson Beach Bathouse but not in the context of swimming, its renovation, or any recreational aspect you might hope-for.

Don't look to the plan for mention of Ramps unless those ramps are for sidewalk accessibility.

The word Fishing appears once, in the context of some policy that would control fish farming -- probably text copied wholesale from some other municipality's plan.

The word Boating is used once, in a non-specific way, in one document titled " Downtown and Harbour Area Special Policy Area".

In that PDF you'll find doozies like this:

Public Access to the Water
10A.4.14. Access to the waterfront will be enhanced wherever possible, particularly at the ends of public rights of way. Publicly accessible docks also form character-defining elements of the Harbour Area and provide informal open space that will be preserved.

Bullshit!

Oh, there are good things in the plan. Lots of words about linking waterfront pathways, and acquiring waterfront properties. But everybody knows there will never be much money for that.

You can have a multi-faceted plan that makes everybody, especially its authors and the politicians, feel-good. But in the end, when it comes to implementation, there is only one group in Kingston that ALWAYS hoovers most of the money: Downtown Kingston. This plan ensures that this will continue.

The plan is crystal clear on this: the systematic and grotesque annual subsidies of Downtown Kingston, the land owners there, and those who run the related tourist-trappings, will continue unabated.

Looking for quality of life initiatives for the residents of the rest of amalgamated Kingston, especially addressing our waterfront-related recreational infrastructure deficit? Not in the plan.

RETIREMENT HOME TO DISPLACE DIVE SHOP in Brockville.

There are appparently no great options in Brockville for Dive Brockville Adventure Centre.

It's the end-game for working waterfront in Brockville, or so it seems.

Working waterfront: once lost, it's gone forever.

This would never happen in Kingston, right? Ask MetalCraft Marine.

10-MILLION LITRES OF SEWAGE were dumped into the St-Lawrence River last Tuesday night during a lengthy power failure.

Nothing's tallied yet on the Utilities Kingston sewer bypass log. They call it a log. It's not a log at all. It's minimum-disclosure b.s., Kingston-style. Here's why.

For a sense of perspective, a very large tank truck, the sort used for wholesale fuel deliveries, can contain 36,000 litres. Imagine a line of 280 such tanker trucks, a queue over 5-kilometers long, lined-up to pump their entire contents in sewage into the water at the causeway. The equivalent of that happened this week in Kingston.

I repeat: Tuesday the City of Kingston dumped the full contents of 280 of these tanks worth of sewage into the St-Lawrence River.

Related:

• Jim Keech, president of Utilities Kingston, must think we're all stupid from July 8, 2008.
• Pollution disclosure, City of Kingston-style from April 10 2008.
• Massive sewage dumping from April 4 2008.
• Past sewage overflow reports have been understated from September 21 2007.
• We need better sewer bypass accounting from November 21 2006.

GOOD ARTICLE BY NATHAN BARON in today's Whig.

Nathan is currently in the midst of a 1000-mile solo-voyage in and around the Bahamas region to qualify for an upcoming single-handed Mini-Transat 6.50 race between France and Brazil.

THE JANUARY THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is up.

THE 2009 KINGSTON BOAT SHOW WEBSITE is up.

The show runs April 17-19 at the Cataraqui Community Centre, taking-over both rinks.

LASER CLASS RESULTS from the 2008 Orange Bowl International Youth Regatta where Kingston's Robert Davis podiumed in six of ten races, including two bullets, finishing second overall and top Canadian in a 39-boat fleet.

PUBLIC ASKED FOR INPUT on Lake Ontario Park's master plan.

There's a token 4-question online survey, and two public meetings are planned, the first on January 21 and the second on March 25, 2009. The January 21 public meeting is between 7 to 9 PM at the Invista Centre.

Let's hope this isn't just public consultation theatre like we've seen with so many City and island projects in the recent past.

IDIOTIC EDITORIAL in the Whig last Saturday about how sinking millions into refurbishing the deep-water dock at the Marine Museum is a "no brainer".

This is a no-brainer, folks. A new pier would provide a tremendous boost to the city's tourism industry with little or no financial risk.

Read the whole thing.

Now read the related report by city staff to Council. Pay attention to the minuscule number of these vessels (one), the low number of expected stoppovers each year (under five), the small number of passengers aboard (which the Whig vastly overstates), and the actual time (a few hours) that ships are expected to be docked.

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.

(From page 8 of the report.)

Don't forget that these passengers arrive already sumptuously-fed with room-and-board aboard. Also consider city staff's record of vastly overstating the economic benefits of all the downtown-centric projects they endorse. Never a thumbs-down when it's downtown.

Here's what's really happening: The Whig is the boardroom-bulletin publisher for the Downtown Kingston BIA.

No subsidy for Downtown Kingston is ever panned, no matter how grotesque. In The Whig, and among city staff, the BIA always trumps the interests of the rest of amalgamated Kingston.

And City Council buys-in every time. Foremost, in this case, is Councillor Bill Glover who is all-in for a dock uber alles. Then there's Councillor Ed Smith is a full-bird member of the BIA's Executive Committee. In addition, we have three other City councillors (Councillors Hector, Hutchison, and Gerretsen) who are council-appointees to the BIA's board of directors and subject to systematic face-time and, therefore, pro-BIA sales pressure.

There's more: None of this includes Councillor Foster and Mayor Rosen who are certifiable Downtown Kingston BIA cronies.

That's how the systematic fleecing of the rest of amalgamated Kingston is engineered. Nevermind the influence of a sycophantic Whig-Standard and the City's mostly downtown-based staff, Council is effectively an arm of the BIA, as opposed to the other way around.

Maybe you thought the last council was bad?

Structurally, the current council is actually worse, and getting worse, because more potential fence-sitting councillors are co-opted into the BIA Board for systematic monthly face-time and indoctrination about the BIA's interests.

Do we need a deep-water dock? Absolutely. We had one but, like most things around town, we never properly maintained it. Should a deep-water dock today be our top infrastructure priority? Should a deep-water dock be Kingston's top waterfront-related priority?

If you had a few million dollars to spend on infrastructure, and assuming you wanted to spend it to improve Kingston's waterfront, would it go to help dock a ship with three-busloads-worth of tourists, three-times per year, for barely an afternoon each time? Or should that money first go towards accessibility and recreation opportunities for the people who actually live here?

Related: This K7 post from October 2008.

RAISINGS AND SINKINGS PAST are the subject of two new Flickr photosets by Paul Wash. These are scans of original photographs by Max Pater who, thankfully, has agreed to share these online.

There are 12 photos from the Cuidad de Inca refloating incident in December 1984, and 20 photos of the Wolfe Islander II sinking in September 1985.

Nearly a quarter-century ago already!

FIVE BRICKBATS TO KINGSTON CITY COUNCIL (2008) is an interesting post by an apparently very well-traveled Canadian.

Here's brickbat number four:

(4) the failure to create a walkable, enjoyable public downtown waterfront.

One of the more annoying aspects of the mismanagement of Kingston is the absolute disregard the city has for its downtown waterfront. Centennial park directly in front of City Hall doesn't cut it. Nor does the little bit of pathway/public space between City Park west beyond KGH. The absolute lack of interest in providing a walkable inviting downtown waterfront from Belle Isle down to the foot of Ontario St is an embarrassment and should shame each and every councillor. It's not difficult - just takes some leadership.

Amen, brother. Read the whole thing.

PHOTOS FROM THIS WEEKEND'S HIGH WINDS have been posted by Chris Wamsley on Flickr. UPDATE: Check out this photo of the Confed breakwall and this Ferry carwash shot.

Also some members of the CFB Dolphins Scuba Club, which is active all winter long, went for a shore-dive to the KGH wreck.

Anyone else have photos to share?

LOCAL CANADIAN CHARTS ON THE OUTS?

That's the scoop according to an article by Ross Pollack in the latest Thousand Islands Life.

According to the article:

These Canadian charts are beautiful examples of the printers' art: at once highly readable and richly presented with great registration of the different colored inks. But government efficiency will soon eliminate the cross-checking possible with different US and Canadian charts of the same St. Lawrence River waters.

According to a spokesman for the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, navigational charts covering the same US-Canada border areas will no longer be produced by both nations, and water boundary areas will be divided between the nations for mapping purposes.

The plan is for the relevant stretch of the St. Lawrence River to be charted by the US alone. Eventually, these Canadian charts, numbers 1435 to 1439, will be obsolete and will be replaced by up-to-date versions of US charts 14770 to 14774 and 14802.

There's apparently nothing else online about this yet. There's something fundamentally repulsive about this.

READER COMMENTS can now be added to any news item or any article in this website.

If this works, this should vastly broaden the input from K7 readers.

This is still in the testing stage, so try it out and let me know what you think.

Just click the "Comments" link below and give it a whirl.

To post a comment, you only need to provide a name or an alias. All other information is voluntary.

THE DECEMBER THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is online.

The zine now features an RSS feed and has a new look. Overall it's a very nice upgrade.

Update: Kingston's now included in their collection of Thousand Islands Communities.

AT COUNCIL TUESDAY: a proposed $115,575 for shoreline repair around the West Street boat ramp, just east of Kingston Yacht Club.

While we're on the subject, here's our list of launch ramps in and around the city.

GUENTER'S WRECK is the subject of a new Preserve Our Wrecks photoset on Flickr.

The photos, which are excellent, were taken in November.

This wreck has been known to local divers since the 1960's, and it was catalogued by Parks Canada as early as 2002.

Last summer, a self-promoter "discovered" it. A lazy, impressionable, and non-fact-checking mainstream media bought-into the story, including CKWS-TV, The Whig, The Montreal Gazette and beyond.

Recently, according to Jonathan Moore, an underwater archeologist with Parks Canada:

We have no real archeological evidence that it is HMS Montreal.

Photo: Christine Pilote

GONE ARE THE OLD-STYLE SHOAL MARKERS in Kingston Harbour. This summer, the M.O.T. replaced them with much smaller, and much lower, cylindrical ones.

Beyond arcane trivia, why would this matter?

There are many factors that make Kingston Harbour a great place to race sailboats. The axis of Lake Ontario, the narrowing and gradual funneling of the shorelines towards Kingston, the low-lying landmasses to the south and west, the landscapes inland that help generate thermal winds, these are all good.

The new Myles Shoal marker

For dinghy-racing sailors, another nice feature of Kingston Harbour is the fortunate positioning of both Myles Shoal and Penitentiary Shoal which, until this summer, were both marked with large green buoys that were easily visible at a mile distance. (See the chart below.)

Myles Shoal lies exactly 1/2 nautical mile off Kingston Yacht Club, almost directly into the teeth of prevailing breezes. Myles Shoal makes a perfect first-target for a group of practice-racing dinghies as they leave shore. The stretch between KYC and Myles Shoal has surely served for many-a-thousand dinghy tunings and warmups over the years.

From there, Penitentiary Shoal lies exactly one nautical mile from Myles Shoal, a perfect practice distance. This leg bears 272 degrees magnetic (ignoring magnetic anomalies), which is typically to the right of prevailing breezes, but this right-offset largely compensates for the left-side bias when racing in Kingston Harbour. The result is usually a tactically balanced upwind practice-leg for a group of racing dinghies. Perfect!

But the new shoal markers are smaller and lower, and can't be seen at a distance of one nautical mile when viewed from low on the water. The markers are in the same positions as always, but there has been a significant downgrade in their recreational utility. There are simply fewer obvious targets to sail-between now. Kingston Harbour lost a dinghy-sailing intangible this summer.

When the M.O.T. decided to swich-out the old shoal markers, it's likely nobody gave the dinghy-sailing aspect any thought whatsoever.

And so it goes: a really special waterfront slowly becomes an ordinary waterfront one step-at-a-time.

Constantly losing intangibles, each one perhaps "no big deal" taken individually, eventually adds-up on aggregate.

HOPE FOR A BRUTAL WINTER because, if current forecasts hold, we may be facing low water in the spring, about a foot lower than in recent years.

Moreover the water-level news from the big-lakes upstream isn't great. Throughout most of 2008 water levels on Lake Superior were rebounding towards normal. Now that gap appears to be widening again.

Downstream from Lake Superior, Lakes Michigan and Huron are still a full 15-inches below normal levels.

LAFARGE LOSES APPEAL, which clears the way for a Environmental Review Tribunal hearing on burning tires at its cement plant in Bath.

So what does Lafarge plan to do? Rather than finally facing serious environmental scrutiny, and stepping-up to years of is own rhetoric, apparently Lafarge is scrapping its plans.

How whacked is that?

K7 TURNS THREE this week.

Here's a big Thank You to some of the folks who've helped along the way with great photos, information, insight, scoops, concerns and corrections.

GUIDE TO THE STACKED HULLS WRECK has just been posted by Preserve Our Wrecks, Kingston.

The 2-page PDF explains how to find the 3 wooden steamer hulls with a shore-dive off KPH.

Related to local diving is the upcoming Talk on the War of 1812 Wrecks. Jonathan Moore, a well-known author on the topic and member of Parks Canada's Underwater Archaeology Service, will be speaking at the Marine Museum in Kingston on Sunday, November 30th at 2 pm to launch his new book on "Shipwrecks from the War of 1812 at Kingston: A Look Beneath the Waves".

THE GROYNE IS A DONE-DEAL, apparently.

Public consultation, Kingston-style: 1) Quickly conjure a single plan with no options, 2) pretend to listen to input, then 3) execute the plan.

Name a recent Kingston waterfront development that didn't follow this pattern, or this pattern minus step-2.

A NEW FORMAT FOR CORK is announced today.

According to the press release, CORK 2009 will play-out ike this:

• August 19 - 22: CORK International Event for Youth and Development dinghy classes.
• August 23 - 27: CORK Olympic Classes Event for high-performance competition in Olympic and invited "development" dinghy classes.
• August 28 - 30: Offshore and One Design Keelboat and Dinghy Classes for Offshore (PHRF) classes, one design Keelboats, Able Sail, and international dinghy classes.

This is great news on a number of levels.

For example, for the first time in many years, there is no overlap between CORK events and the obnoxious 1000 Islands Kingston Poker Run, currently scheduled for August 7-8 2009.

Another plus: better segmenting the events means better cohesion amongst participants. Youth and young sailors together; high-performance sailors together; and keelboat with international-class dinghies all together. This makes planning the all-important social packages more straightforward.

Another plus: dates for the Keelboats and international-class dinghies -- generally older adult sailors -- dovetail with the 2009 Kingston Blues Festival.

Another plus: CORK 2009 spans just 12-days of competition, compared to 18-days for CORK 2008. This will be much easier on the volunteer-base, so better regattas for all-concerned are likely to result.

Any downsides? It's hard to quibble with any of this.

Also booked for 2009 so far: cats!

• July 17-19 - Hobie 16 Women and Youth North American Championship
• July 20-24 - Hobie 16 Open North American Championship

THE 2015 PAN-AM GAMES BID goes to Toronto's City Council today.

If (Toronto) council endorses the bid, a more detailed report is expected in February that will help lay out a venue plan and a detailed look at the financial, social, economic and infrastructure implications of the 2015 games. A formal bid must be submitted to the Pan American Sports Organization by April.

So KEDCO is running out of time to get the Sailing event for Kingston.

Here's the 6-page City of Toronto Staff Report on the matter.

The (Toronto) City Manager recommends that (Toronto) City Council:

1. Endorse the City of Toronto's role as the host city and participant in a bid to be submitted by the Bid Corporation to host the 2015 Pan American/ParaPan American Games in Toronto and communities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe region.

It's not looking good.

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.

THE BIG JIM SHOWDOWN, this weekend at POH, rises from the ashes of the WFN Canadian Open debacle.

This pro/am fishing event will run in support of well-known fisherman, Jim McLaughlin, and his battle with cancer, while also honouring our Canadian Forces.

It starts Friday at the Junior Officer's Mess at CFB Kingston, Saturday and Sunday at POH.

STUDYING THE LIFE OF THE LAKE in today's Whig, by Brian Johnson, about the research of nautical archeologist Ben Ford.

More about The Museum of Underwater Archaeology and The Lake Ontario Maritime Cultural Landscape Project.

THE SEPTEMBER 2008 ISSUE OF THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is now online.

Susan W. Smith is the new editor replacing Paul Malo who recently passed away.

Inside, A trip to Kingston's Rosemount Inn, among other articles.

IT'S ALWAYS INTERESTING to read how visitors percieve Kingston.

Here's a narrative titled Day 77 Drive from Keeseville to Kingston, Ontario by a couple who arrived last week via Horne's Ferry towing a pop-up trailer.

Some of their photos are excellent, albums here and here, particularly this photo and this one.

Then there's this picture showing a rooftop air-conditioner on the Clarence Street Post Office destroying an otherwise enchanting sightline. That's Kingston.

TWO WATERFRONT-RELATED ITEMS ON THE AGENDA of the City's Arts, Recreation & Community Policies Committee meeting of Thursday September 25th.

• Status Report on the Richardson Beach and bath house enhancements. Beware, the diagrams in this document's exhibits are unreadable. The City Clerk's office actually does work to make the illustrations unreadable, as opposed to simply "Print to PDF" which would give us a perfect copy. Better version here, here, here, and here.
• Mr. Mark Siemons Chair of the Marine Museum Board of Trustees, will speak regarding the consideration for enhanced municipal support for the Marine Museum.

FIVE-ANCHOR ECO-RATINGS have finally been awarded to both POH and Confed by the Ontario Marina Operators Association's Clean Marine Program.

The City of Kingston-operated marinas join Collins Bay Marina which received its 5-anchor rating in 2005, one of the first in Ontario to achieve it.

Other local eco-rated marinas include Kingston Marina, Treasure Island Marina, and Loyalist Cove Marina.

Local OMOA-member marinas that have no eco-rating at all include Rideau Marina and Blue Woods Marina.

THE GREAT CANADIAN SHORELINE CLEANUP is the subject of a Whig article yesterday. The volunteer cleanup is between September 20 and 28th.

For more information about the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup call 1-877-427-2422, local co-ordinator Serge Landry at 541-6000, extension 3664. Volunteers can also go to www.vanaqua.org/cleanup.

NO RAIN in the latest 14-day outlook.

It surely won't turn-out that way, but it's a notable and rare forecast.

Summer's here.

CHRIS HARVEY, CKWS NEWSWATCH get suckered.

To be fair, it's all mainstream media reporting so far on the so-called HMCS Montreal and her sister ships.

THE FINAL OF THE WFN 2008 BASS TOUR, THE CANADIAN OPEN, which was supposedly coming to Kingston September 19-21, isn't going to happen.

Apparently word of the cancellation has been known in fishing circles since late May.

By the looks of this, the folks at WFN are adept at self-congratulating press-releases announcing the event (November 2007), then later announcing sponsors (Lakeport Beer in March 2008).

But when things derail, mum's the word.

The event is still listed on the KEDCO website.

Related: K7's news item from last November.

A DISMAL WIND FORECAST FOR SATURDAY has prompted the organizers of the Pro-Am Canadian Freestyle Jam windsurfing championship to postpone until next weekend.

THE PROPOSED RENAMING OF BREAKWATER PARK, a move by the Kingston Historical Society, is on the Municipal Heritage Committee agenda for the September 8th meeting.

Breakwater Park is the 8.4 acre waterfront park along King St West that today contains, among other things, the iconic sculpture named "Time".

The proposal is to name the park after Lt.-Col. John Bradstreet, the British officer who led the "battle" to overthrow Fort Frontenac 250-years ago.

John Bradstreet had 3,000 men at his disposal against 110 French soldiers garrisoned inside the Fort. The French surrendered without a fight. Then Bradstreet plundered, burned, and demolished the fort. Then Bradstreet left town.

Which raises the questions: Why? Bradstreet, and why Kingston's premier waterfront park?

Should such honours be reserved for, say, people who actually lived here? Does Kingston's history not have valorous military commanders who didn't enjoy a 30-1 man advantage upon arrival? How about, say, somebody who actually built something? As opposed to John Bradstreet, who extracted a quick surrender, then plundered and demolished the place before immediately moving on.

More on John Bradstreet at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online.

MILESTONE AT RAVENSVIEW, from Allen Lucas, Utilities Kingston engineer.

It gives me great pleasure to inform everyone that on September 4th at about 4:00 pm, wastewater was started flowing through the Biological Aerated Filters. This signifies the culmination of a lot of hard work and tremendous effort on the part of the construction team, the engineering team and Utilities Kingston operations staff.

GEOFF WEBSTER, official photographer for CORK, has posted 570 photos taken last month at the Contender World Championships here in Kingston.

This is, by far, the largest online collection of photos of a regatta in Kingston.

Geoff has some 80,000+ regatta photographs since 1980 in his archives.

AT COUNCIL TONIGHT is a motion to...

"....prevent any development within 120 m of the high water mark of the Rideau waterway from the Lasalle Causeway to the northern boundary of the city without the permission of Council."

Most people don't realize the northern extent of the City of Kingston.

FYI, this motion includes:

• The Cataraqui River (both shores)
• Colonel By Lake (both shores)
• The South shore of River Styx
• The South Shore of Cranberry Lake
• The South Shore of Little Cranberry Lake
• The South Shore of part of Whitefish Lake
• And both shores, or just the South shore, of all the waterways interconnecting the above.

This is a job for a proper Conservation Authority, one that doesn't give a rats-ass if your name is Brit Smith or Byron Springer.

Details in The Whig, but there is no sense therein of the full extent of this.

WE HAVE A NEW LOCAL SHORE DIVE off Kingston General Hospital.

Divers from Preserve Our Wrecks Kingston laid a line leading to the charted wreck yesterday. Quoting the POW Blog post about it:

The wreck is in very good condition; one of the more intact examples of what is certainly a sailing vessel and probably associated with use on the canal systems. It's almost a hundred feet long and about 24 feet wide. Care should be taken by visiting divers to avoid disturbing and damaging many upright features that have stood the test of time.

The wreck is well known already; it features on local charts, but it has not previously been of great interest, since it lies in the path of frequent boat traffic and didn't have any line to it from shore.

Update: New photos and video of this wreck.

See the updated List of Shore Dives near Kingston on the K7 "Wrecks" page. The list now contains 17 shore dives.

While you are there, there's a new Google Map pin on the position of the HMS Montreal which was supposedly "discovered" earlier this month leading to much fanfare in mainstream media.

EXTREME PRESSURE CHANGES NEAR WIND TURBINE BLADES injures bat lungs, according to a recent University of Calgary study.

A bat mortality study supervised by U of C biology professor Robert Barclay that began in 2006 has determined that the vast majority of bats found dead below turbines near Pincher Creek suffered severe injuries to their respiratory systems consistent with a sudden drop in air pressure -- called barotrauma -- that occurs when the animals get close to turbine blades...

The study shows that 90 per cent the bats examined after death showed signs of internal hemorrhaging consistent with barotraumas while only about half of the bats showed any evidence of direct contact with the blades.

So wind turbines are deadlier to flying animals than just the trauma of contact with the blades. Flying close to a blade can kill too.

RIDEAU LAKES MISS THE BOAT, according to the Saturday Ottawa Citizen.

Area has everything except a visible attempt to promote itself

This area between Smiths Falls and Kingston has lakes of all sizes, the Rideau Canal, the Cataraqui Trail, fine fishing, decent golf courses, excellent scenery and some quaint towns. What it doesn't have is any visible effort to promote or package all that attractive stuff.

That's so true. The Township of Rideau Lakes is an independent entity and, if the author is correct, then tourism-wise Kingston has an evidently weak northern neighbor with tons of potential.

Just like Quebec City benefits from Mt. Ste-Anne, and Montreal benefits from the Eastern Townships, Kingston stands to gain from having stronger tourism players in the region.

Not that Kingston currently contributes much regionally. Currently, Kingston's tourism "region", its sole focus, covers barely a square-mile.

If Kingston can shake its myopia and break free from the cult of Downtown Kingston, then maybe it could eventually help strengthen, and center, a vast and dynamic region.

VIDEO FROM THE CONTENDER WORLDS on YouTube.

Day 1 was sailed in light and shifty breezes.

Note the damage from Snake Island Shoal shown at the end of the video. The Contender Worlds, a 34-competitor event, are being sailed on Foxtrot course, out beyond Kingston Harbour.

While you are there, here's an interesting tour of Soren Andreasen's boat from Denmark.

The last time this happened, back in April, it didn't turn out that way.

THE BLACK ANGUS SAILS AGAIN in this weekend's edition of Kingston This Week.

It's about the successful 7,000-hour restoration of a 100-year-old 28-foot wood double-ended clinker fishing boat by volunteers at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes.

LOCAL SAILORS, and many sailors who regularly train here, posted some great results at the Canadian Youth National Sailing Championships -- see results for the Alpha and Bravo racing areas -- that ended yesterday in Halifax. In summary:

• Robert Davis, Tom Ramshaw, Matthew Ryder, and Justin Norton were 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th of 25 boats in the Laser class.
• Danielle Boyd (crew), and Peter and Paul Ehvert finished 1st and 2nd in the 29er class.
• Charlotte Skinner finished 3rd in the 27-boat Laser Radial class.

Note the other good results by some of our younger up-and-comers.

Update: August 16th Whig Article on Danielle Boyd.

CONTENDERS FOR SALE after the World Championships, which runs between August 19-23. The ask for these used single-handed trapeze boats from UK competitors ranges between $1,900 and $7,000.

Some older boats from Toronto are also available after the worlds. Contact Neil Smith (contenderkc62@yahoo.com).

BARGE TRANSPORTATION AND OTHER LOGISTICS for the Wolfe Island Wind Project are the subject of an interesting article in today's Whig.

The large barge is loaded in Ogdensburg, NY, and unloads at the Wolfe Island winter ferry dock. Meanwhile, on Wolfe Island, lots of preparations are well underway.

LYME DISEASE TICKS ARE SPREADING in the region, according to today's Whig Standard.

Related: prior posts on Lyme Disease.

EXCELLENT OP-ED BY JAMIE SWIFT in today's Whig Standard about the obnoxious Poker Run, which is this weekend.

A group of concerned citizens has been distributing postcards around town protesting the poker run. Here you can download the front and the back of that postcard, which is addressed to Mayor Harvey Rosen.

The "CITY OF KINGSTON 2008 WATERFRONT PATHWAY" is the subject of a pamphlet being distributed to tourists at all the usual places.

"Kingston's Waterfront Pathway" is also the subject of a web page in the "Visitors" area of the City of Kingston Website.

Only two-thirds of the 9 (not 8) Km suggested by the brochure could actually be considered "on waterfront".

Long stretches along King Street, with no water whatsoever in evidence, are part of the suggested "waterfront" pathway.

Look closely: they suggest you walk around the K-Rock Centre as part of the waterfront tour.

That's odd, because it steers walkers away from an exquisite stretch of our waterfront: the Lasalle Causeway, the RMC grounds, then Point Frederick, then Navy Bay and its very active boating facilities, Fort Henry of course, and then Point Henry all the way around behind the Fort. Then up and around for the best vista in town, from the very top of Fort Henry Hill.

Not a word about any of that. A full 5 Km continuously by the water, including majestic elevated views of the city and the harbour. All of it walkable and cycleable. This is easily the longest uninterrupted "waterfront pathway" we've got.

But it merits no mention whatsoever in the City of Kingston tourist brochure about our walkable waterfront.

They've printed some 14,000 copies over the past two years. Here's who's responsible for grossly misrepresenting our walkable waterfront to visitors.

Respect for waterfront means never, EVER selling it short. In this town, in the Harvey Rosen era, disrespect for our waterfront is rampant.

THIS PHOTO from the 1980 Laser Worlds is worth checking out.

Tillerman is running a caption contest for it. Nevermind the captions suggested so far, some of the comments about Kingston and CORK are interesting. When it comes to reputation, infrastructure and attention to details count for a lot.

Click for a larger version.

Trivia: who won the 1980 Laser Worlds in Kingston, and who was the top Canadian? Answer. See also Women's Worlds results.

WATER LEVELS ARE STILL ABOVE AVERAGE, about a foot above last year at this time, after peaking impressively in mid-May.

The big news is upstream: Lake Superior water levels have rebounded remarkably since this time last year.

MARINAS.COM has a very impressive database of aerial photographs of marinas all over the world, including many in the region. Have a look.

In Kingston

• Blue Woods Marina
• CFB Kingston Yacht Club
• Collins Bay Marina
• Cunningham Rd Marina
• Kingston Marina
• Music Marina
• Portsmouth Olympic Harbour
• Rideau Marina
• Royal Military College
• Treasure Island Marina
• Trident Yacht Club

In Gananoque

• Gananoque Municipal Marina
• Brennan Marine
• Clark's Marina
• Gananoque Inn
• Gordon Marine
• Hunt's Marina

In Bath

• Loyalist Cove Marina

FINALLY the KFL&A Health Unit has a dedicated beach report web page.

Getting that took over a year. Think: pulling teeth.

Another plus: The Health Unit's page lists 41 beaches, covering a wide area.

By contrast, the City of Kingston's "Environment" page lists just 11 city beaches plus Big Sandy Bay.

But the Health Unit lists four swimming spots in the City that, for some reason, don't appear on the City website:

• The PUC dock at the foot of Collingwood street,
• the Collins Bay Pier,
• Lemoine Point which, oddly, the Health Unit classifies under "Cataraqui Conservation Authority". This area is within the City of Kingston, and should be listed as such.
• What they call "Lake Ontario Hospital", which is either behind the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, or Breakwater Park. We're supposed to guess.

So the City and the Health Unit currently aren't on the same page when it comes to keeping swimmers healthy.

Downsides: The Health Unit and the City of Kingston can't seem to agree on names for some beaches. Respect for our beaches surely starts with referring to them properly in official communications.

Here's what needs to drastically improve next because this still isn't good enough. Vital information still isn't being disclosed, like:

• The date of the sample was collected.
• The specific level of E.coli found, as they do in Hastings & Prince Edward Counties.
• How, exactly, was the sample collected? Was it from a boat perhaps hundreds of feet off the beach, or within a few yards of the waterline where children actually swim?

Related: A swimmable Lake Ontario, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper Podcast from June 5, 2008. This covers, in detail, what's wrong with the current state of beach reporting around Lake Ontario.

The bottom line: thanks for finally creating a web page, but we really need way better information to make choices. See, for example, the Hastings & Prince Edward Counties Health Unit beach report.

MASS-SWIM ROUNDUP

• Lake Ontario Waterkeeper made the Richardson Beach mass swim the main subject of its weekly podcast. (You can subscribe to the Living At the Barricades Podcast via iTunes).

  This is interesting: starting at the 27:50 minute mark of the 30-minute podcast, Waterkeeper Mark Mattson urges cities to stop pitching the press about "unknown" sources of E. coli, and get out to the beaches and actually investigate. Co-host Krystyn Tully then suggests how they should be doing that.

  Also Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has posted event photos in their new space on Flickr.

• The Whig Standard ("dozens of people") and Kingston This Week ("Hundreds take back the beach") both printed reports this week.

• Here's the transcript posted by CKWS-TV News on July 23rd.

The mass swim, a wakeup call in support of Richardson Beach, happened last Tuesday, July 22nd.

GORDON ISLAND IS CLOSED TEMPORARILY because the racoon population is posing a serious threat to public safety. The island will be closed to the public from 1 p.m. on Sunday, July 27, 2008 until 11 a.m. on Friday, August 1, 2008.

Gordon Island, part of the St. Lawrence Islands National Park of Canada, is 3-miles east of Gananoque.

RICHARDSON BEACH PRELIMINARY PLANS are posted. So far it's just sketches, no text.

It also appears to be mostly not about the beach, but about landscaping above the beach in the form of pathways and lookouts.

What's with the rock-bounded funnel-shaped groin in the water? The rationale for that will be interesting to hear. Someone should probably ask if the designer has ever been to a beach people actually use for swimming. Note there's no roped-off swimming area, no swimmers, and no windsurfers shown in any of the drawings.

Updated: Mixed reaction from members of on the Kingston Boardsailing Association. Boardsailors are the folks who currently use Richardson Beach the most. Among other points, the current drawings show drastic cuts to the area they need for rigging and laying-out sailboards.

THE 25-PAGE REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL for consulting services for the development of a master plan for Lake Ontario Park has been released by the City.

The RFP is due Wednesday, August 13, 2008.

Related:

• Looking for a plan from March 23rd of this year. Evidently there hasn't been much progress in this dossier over the past 4-months.
• $8.5 million budgeted through 2013 for Lake Ontario Park upgrades, from June 16 2008.
• Lake Ontario Waterkeeper's Beach Report 2007 mentions "Lake Ontario Municipal Beach" (sic), from October 2007, based on a visit in July 31st, 2006.
• $30,000 budgeted for the Lake Ontario Park Master Plan from March 20, 2007. That's been boosted to a maximum of $125,000 in the RFP.
• Three LOP concept plans from June 30th, 2006. Two years ago already.
• Also, the Lake Ontario Park article on Wikipedia needs work.

EDITORIAL AND OP-ED pieces about Richardson Beach in today's Whig.

BEACH CLOSURES are the subject of front-page stories in both The Whig and Kingston This Week today.

Read them both.

Jim Keech, president of Utilities Kingston, must think we're all stupid.

He certainly knows that Osprey Media reporters are pushovers.

Here we have the City of Kingston bypassing over 7,000 cubic meters of sewage -- over 1.5 million imperial gallons -- into our local waterways all within the past 10-days and we're led to believe the e.coli fouling our beaches must be due to birds.

It gets worse: they aren't actually metering all the City's sewer bypass points.

And our mainstream media just parrots what these ass-covering municipal suits say.

For perspective, imagine 300 tanker trucks, each with 5,000 gallon capacity exactly like the one pictured here, lined-up taking turns pumping their full contents of sewage into the water. That's what 1.5 million gallons looks like. The equivalent of that happened this past week in Kingston, by the City of Kingston itself. And big-cheese Jim Keech says that e.coli has "...nothing to do with sewage" and "...the by-passes that we've had have been relatively insignificant".

Related:

• Pollution disclosure, City of Kingston-style from April 10 2008.
• Massive sewage dumping from April 4 2008.
• Past sewage overflow reports have been understated from September 21 2007.
• We need better sewer bypass accounting from November 21 2006.

THE SUMMER 2008 NEWSLETTER from Preserve Our Wrecks Kingston is available for download. Therein, among other things, is acknowledgement of the condiderable volunteer work done by the local dive community to the benefit of local tourism.

You'll also find information on the Kingston Underwater Event to be held August 8-10 at the Marine Museum and at City Hall. This is a showcase of Kingston's role as a premier freshwater dive location with a focus on diving, maritime heritage, conservation, and environmental issues.

GROUP SEEKS BEACH CLEANUP is front-page in The Whig today, about the awareness-raising Mass Swim planned for July 22nd at Richardson Beach.

It's amazing that it has come to this.

The decrepit state of Richardson Beach is plainly evident to anyone who cares to look, and the outcry over our neglected beaches was widely acknowledged in the last municipal election campaign.

AT COUNCIL THIS TUESDAY: a 5-year Crawford Wharf docking agreement with St. Lawrence Cruise Lines Inc, which includes their ticket booth, for $2,200/year.

St. Larence Cruise Lines has called Kingston home since 1982. The vessel in question is the M/V Canadian Empress, a 66 passenger replica steamboat built in 1981, pictured here.

GREAT RESULTS BY LOCAL ATHLETES:

• Will Crothers and Rob Gibson of Kingston helped Canada's under-23 men's eight win the Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta in England.
• Robert Davis finishes fourth in the youth division and eighth in the Silver fleet in a very tough pre-Olympic Laser field at Kiel Week in Germany.
• Martin ten Hove won two gold medals and the Kingston Rowing Club claimed second place at the Eastern Rowing Championships at the Olympic Basin in Montreal.

THIS SUMMER'S MAJOR ONE-DESIGN CHAMPIONSHIP REGATTAS are as follows:

World Championships

Contender Worlds (CORK August 18 - 23)

North American Championships

29er (CORK August 16 - 20)

470 (CORK August 17 - 20)

Flying Dutchman (CORK August 21 - 24)

Canadian Championships

29er (KYC July 26-27)

Etchells (CORK August 7-10)

Contender (CORK August 16 - 17)

F18 (CORK August 21 - 24)

49er (CORK August 21 - 24)

Albacore (CORK September 19 - 21)

This is somewhat different than the list posted back on February 29th; then the Laser, Laser Radial, and Laser 4.7 North Americans were thought to be coming here, but end-up in San Fransico. Also in the interim, the 49er North Americans turned into the 49er Canadians.

The CITY OF KINGSTON BEACH REPORT continues to be a complete screwup.

Boys and girls, how hard is it to maintain a simple list, as inadequate as that is compared to the extensive service lake swimmers get in Toronto?

Moreover the City of Kingston's beach report is still linking to a non-existent page at the Health Unit's old website address.

Related: Another summer of ad-hoc Kingston beach reports from June 23rd.

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES AT CORK.

Volunteering at CORK is always special. Many CORK volunteers gladly return year after year. Everyone you'll meet there is a giver.

STILL SOME JUNIOR SAILING CAMP OPENINGS AT KYC for the White Sail I & II sailing program for the 2-week session beginning June 30th. Pass the word.

AT THE KINGSTON PUBLIC HEARING of the International Board of Control, which was held Tuesday evening at City Hall, speakers expressed overwhelming support in favour of Plan B+.

Plan B+ is the lake water-level management scheme which would see generally more water retained in Lake Ontario, for longer periods, under a wide range of conditions, especially during fair weather seasons.

Call it "the keep more water here plan". It's also the plan computer models show as having the higher range of water levels -- the highest highs, but also the lowest lows -- during the boating season. It's also the plan favoured by many environmental groups.

But many who have built in places that prudence would never advise aren't keen on Plan B+. Some were here in Kingston City Hall on Tuesday night too.

Plan B+ and Plan 2007 compared under average and extreme high and low-water conditions.

ANOTHER SUMMER OF AD-HOC KINGSTON BEACH REPORTS, it seems.

The Health Unit Communications Officer, Mr Justin Chenier, has made it very clear: there are currently no plans for a link, nevermind a dedicated page, about local beaches on the Health Unit website. Don't even think about it; it's not on the radar.

If you need the latest on local beaches, you'll need to root through the Health Unit's news dispatches, essentially fending for yourself, interpreting the fragmentary disclosures therein. Assuming you find it at all.

Also, this Health Unit declares beaches unsafe, but does not explicitly declare them safe again. So faced with, say, a 5-day old beach report, what should one conclude?

Alternately, you could consult this City of Kingston web page (found via "Residents", then "Environment", not "Recreation") which provides a list, but with no date-of-update and no other cues, so information freshness is always in doubt here. This same page showed Lake Ontario Park Beach and Rotary Park Beach closed for most of the winter, a sign that keeping this list fresh certainly wasn't any sort of priority last year.

The City web page currently links to the Health Unit's old website address (http://www.healthunit.on.ca/programs/environ.html) which, like all references to the old website, redirects to the current home page where, assuming the beach news hasn't scrolled-off, you might find more beach-related information in the 4-item news-area found there.

This is all very sloppy. There's no possible excuse for this.

Now look at Toronto: they do it better. Toronto has:

• several dedicated pages about its beaches,
• detailed recent, and not-so-recent, quantitative data on specific sampling results,
• the location of beach warning signs so you'll know where to look,
• a daily beach overview of the region including a general interactive map leading to beach-specific maps, and
• a hotline anyone can call, (416-392-7161), to hear a recording of the very latest water quality conditions.

Here in Kingston, don't even think of making suggestions for the Health Unit website: they are evidently only interested in hearing themselves tell you how great the KFL&A Health Unit website is. You'll be talking with God's gift to local beach users. That's got to change.

Related:

• Health Unit snoozing from a year ago, June 23 2007.
• Finally we have an online beach report, from August 24th 2007. We've made zero forward progress in the 10-months since.
• A swimmable Lake Ontario (June 5, 2008), an excellent, recent, and directly-related podcast from Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

All this is emblematic of how much our municipal and local bureaucracies, at every level, need a swift kick-in-the-butt when it comes to respecting our waterfront and its users.

See also: You snooze, you lose -- Kingston's disappearing waterfront. This beach-report situation is more evidence that some nine-to-fivers among us are evidently auto-stumbling through their waterfront-related dossiers.

THE EASTERN ONTARIO ARTIFICIAL REEF ASSOCIATION seeks on-line petition signatures in support of the sinking of the destroyer HMCS Terra Nova which, apparently, isn't a done-deal yet.

The scuttling is supposed to be just off Browns Bay Provincial Park, near Mallorytown on the 1000 Islands Parkway.

Add your name to the list of signators and support this.

ROTATED AND UNREADABLE is Major Capital Projects (Schedule B) in this week's Council documents. Inside, zooming-in and squinting, are the following tallies:

If you could, how would you allocate $30 over 5-years? How much of that would you put on the Tett Centre? Lake Ontario Park? Waterfront acquisition?

Updated: The city cleaned-up and re-posted the document, and readability is much improved.

HERE'S THE SNOWBIRDS AIRSHOW SAFETY ZONE in Kingston Harbour.

The airshow is scheduled for Wednesday, June 18 from 6:30 to 7:15 p.m. exactly.

The exclusion zone isn't boater friendly; it prevents virtually all boat circulation near Kingston.

Click for a larger version.

Here are visitation and service details for Bud Gormley, past chairman of CORK and past commodore of KYC, who passed away June 9th.

Bud Gormley was 72 years-old.

The Waterfront Challenge is a national [ed: actually, North American] competition to encourage people who care about their local waterfront, to improve their local waterfront.

The Challenge is designed for any group of three or more people who want to spend a minimum of two days of their lives improving their local waterfront and encouraging others to do the same. Projects should be new, and make some part of your waterfront an environmentally better place.

Seven regional awards of $5,000 each will be presented, along with a separate grand prize of $25,000. Canada is considered a region. Projects must be completed by November 5 2008.

THE MUSEUM OF UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY is a cool outreach by underwater archaeologists and maritime historians. It's an example of how the web is bringing otherwise obscure science and history to a wider audience.

They are currently conducting research in Lake Ontario on wrecks near Kingston. A recent jourunal entry from May 2008 describes work off Carleton Island, on the other side of Wolfe Island near Cape Vincent.

This entry from July 2007 has an intriguing drawing of Kingston waterfront circa 1813, looking from downtown over to RMC and Fort-Henry hill, pre-fort. Here's the larger version of the drawing.

In the Whig today, this story about a move by the Kingston Historical Society to rename Breakwater Park after Lt.-Col. John Bradstreet, the British officer who led the battle to overthrow Fort Frontenac 250-years ago this August.

The French among us may not be amused by this idea. John Bradstreet had 3,000 men at his disposal against 110 French soldiers garrisoned inside the Fort.

Maybe this park could be renamed in perpetuity after present-day narcissists for the equivalent of one-sixth the cost of a single renovation. Like what's happened to Market Square. Here's a reminder how that went down. For history's sake.

HERE'S THE ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT R.F.I. for the third crossing of the Great Cataraqui River (10 pages). Submissions are due by June 25th.

The proposed period of environmental assessment is between November 2008 and December 2010, which ends just beyond this term of Council.

AN ONGOING WRECK SURVEY IN NAVY BAY, from the Dolphins Scuba Club, and more from Preserve Our Wrecks.

TOKEN PARK PROPOSAL IS A WATERFRONT DOWNGRADE, says a thoughtful reader commenting on Kingston's Disappearing Waterfront.

Here's the problem:

In prior years, the seawalls of Block D, some 200 linear meters worth, were commonly used for docking, including docking very large boats. The Block D seawall was also used for RC model boat competitions.

The current proposal for Token Park has the seawall finished with stone boulders, just like most of Kingston's waterfront.

Which begs these questions:

1. Why does this shoreline, already well under cover of the Confederation Basin boulder breakwall, need to have a boulder-block finish?

2. Doesn't Kingston have enough inacessible boulder seawalls already?
3. Why is the City of Kingston apparently settling for the minimum-cost-to-Brit-Smith option while rendering 200m of shoreline completely inaccessible and dysfunctional?

KINGSTON'S DISAPPEARING WATERFRONT is the subject of a new K7 article that lists Kingston public waterfront attributes recently lost, at risk of loss, or in flux.

It's not pretty; it's all happening fast.

You snooze, you lose.

See for yourself.

FISHING AT THE BARRICADES PART 1 and PART 2 are two interesting recent podcasts from Lake Ontario Waterkeeper on the state of fishing in Lake Ontario.

Lake Ontario covers 7,540 square miles. There is very little commercial fishery activity on the Canadian side, and no commercial fishery at all based on the the American side. Not so long ago, there was lots.

Subscribe to the Living At the Barricades Podcast via iTunes.

LITO OCHOTORENA'S FLICKR PAGE has some good photos of yesterday's annual "Don't Rock the Boat" water safety event at Collins Bay Marina.

On K7's Flickr page you can find a photo of the event's man-overboard demonstration, as well as pictures of last weekend's visit by HMCS Kingston taken by Mike Hill and Geoff Webster.

LAKE ONTARIO WATER LEVELS HAVE APPARENTLY PEAKED. Almost off the chart. Normally the peak is in late June.

Related: A primer on the International Joint Commission's plans for Lake Ontario water levels.

UPDATE: Here's a photo, courtesy of photographer Geoff Webster, of yesterday's christening of Nathan Baron's boat "number 680" in honour of The Boys and Girls Club of Canada.

Here are recent photos of the boat in the shop for its winter re-fit.

The Mini Transat is a single-handed yacht race from La Rochelle France to Salvador Brazil. Current plans have the team soon training in Annapolis and racing in the double-handed race from Annapolis to Bermuda Ocean Race (BOR), which starts June 13th, with Nathan Baron and Greg van Rossem aboard.

A FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TENDER to repair "St. Lawrence Seawall" at CFB Kingston.

Does anybody know the location of this particular seawall? E-mail.

INSIDE LOOK AT THE LAFARGE TIRE-BURNING CASE is a very interesting podcast from Lake Ontario Waterkeeper. A good summary of where we stand, and don't stand.

Download the 12.5 Mb MP3 file which runs 27:19 minutes. You can also subscribe to Lake Ontario Waterkeeper podcasts with iTunes.

A PRIMER ON IJC PLANS is a new K7 page that shows how Lake Ontario water levels in two plans still under consideration by the International Joint Commission differ from the plan we've had for the past 50 years.

THE SPINY WATER FLEA is the subject of an interesting article in The Whig yesterday.

Anglers on local lakes are being asked to let their lines, nets and other gear dry completely between fishing expeditions to prevent the spread of a parasite that a Queen's University researcher (Dr. Shelley Arnott) fears is taking over Ontario's lakes.

The same proscription presumably applies to boats and trailers.

A HOME FOR THE PHOEBE is the title for a front-page colour photo in Friday's Kingston This Week.

Students in the Building Construction Internship Program heritage carpentry class secure a piece onto one of four large timber trusses that will support the roof of a 22x60 foot exhibit pavillion. The shelter at the rear of the Pump House Stream Museum will house the restored steamboat Phoebe. The group of 12 students should have the building complete by the end of the school year.

Related: This diagram of the exhibit shelter from last September.

AT COUNCIL ON TUESDAY is the recommendation to use Black Bird Holding, LTD of Belleville for replacing B-dock at Confederation Basin.

They beat other bids from Goderich and Peterborough.

METALCRAFT MARINE'S NEW FIREBOAT FOR VICTORIA is their first fireboat built for service in Canada.

One fireboat in forty built so far. All told, MetalCraft Marine have built over 500 hulls.

IT'S BEEN A WHILE, likely since 1998, that we've had such high water on Lake Ontario.

A FRESH MAKEOVER for the CORK website.

LAKE ONTARIO PARK CLEANUP, by the Friends of Lake Ontario Park and all interested volunteers, is planned for this Friday (April 25) from 1 to 4 pm.

It's 37 acres, and it's worth doing.

Bags and gloves are available at the 'long house' anytime after 1 pm.

Related: Lake Ontario Park, looking for a plan from March 23rd.

THE NEW SHED FOR AHOY RENTALS is currently under construction behind the Marine Museum.

Ahoy Rentals' new shed is shifted West to accommodate a new timber frame exhibit shelter for the Phoebe.

Here are links to the Ahoy Rentals and the Phoebe restauration project websites.

SCUBA DIVING MAGAZINE has a brief article on diving near Kingston, now online from its March issue. The article covers three wrecks: The George A. Marsh, The Comet, and The Wolfe Islander II.

From the introduction:

With upward of 24 known moored wrecks, including schooners, barges and passenger ships, Kingston, Ontario, is a tempting destination for cold-water wreck divers. In fact, more than 400 ships are known to have wrecked in the area.

Well worth reading each spring: SHOCKING NEWS ABOUT COLD WATER.

• Nine elite marines, water survival instructors, capsized in 36 degree water wearing sweatsuits and no PFDs. None of them survived the attempted 100 yard swim to shore.
• Sixteen (16) Danish fishermen jumped into the icy waters of the North Sea when their trawler sank in a storm. They were in the water for a 2 - 3 hours before being rescued. They walked across the deck of the rescue vessel and went down into the galley to warm up. Each and every one collapsed and died in the galley.
• An average adult person has a 50/50 chance of surviving a 50 yard swim in 50F water.
• A 50 year-old person in 50F water has a 50/50 chance of surviving for 50 minutes.

The water temperature in Kingston Harbour is currently about 40F.

Read the whole thing. Stay safe.

TWO LOCAL SAILORS, Audrey Kobayashi and Robert Davis, recently learned they'll receive Quest for Gold Carding and funding from the provinvial Ministry of Health Promotion.

JOSEPH AND MOLLY BRANT are subjects in the latest Thousand Island Life, now online.

This is circa 1783. Relatively recent by some local waterfront standards.

HERE'S THE LINEUP of exhibitors for the Kingston Boat Show this upcoming weekend.

It's a pretty good list, all things considered.

IDLING BOATS are covered in a proposed by-law to control the idling of vehicles and boats, still in committee at City Hall.

They've received several comments about how boats, with no breaks, need to idle engines to a warm state for safety reasons, since stalling leaves few options. So here's the exemption that addresses that:

4.4 Vehicles or boats where idling is required to repair or prepare the vehicle or boat for service

NEW WEBSITE for Preserve Our Wrecks, Kingston. Adjust your bookmarks, the URL is new: http://powkingston.org

Related: Preserve Our Wrecks, Kingston blog.

ON THE LEFT you see the Bypass Log For The City of Kingston.

It's reduced to 500 pixels high so you can see it in one view.

The red box is where they put the "news" about the immense sewer dumping tally of the past three weeks.

Visitors need to scroll way down to see it, past several cues that suggest the page is stale, two months out of date.

Pollution disclosure, City of Kingston-style:

Right:"Table 3" from April 3.
It lists 5 events.

( See it full-size here, from our April 4th news item.)

Right:"Table 3" from April 7.
It now lists just 4 events.

One new row has appeared, a small spill, but two rows have scrolled-off.

Vanished: 57,000 m^3 -- 12.5 MILLION gallons of sewage dumped barely 2-weeks ago.

THE BRIGANTINE St Lawrence II is busy, judging by their Spring work program.

The Summer 2008 schedule starts on Lake Erie and extends to Lake Huron and Georgian Bay before sailing back to Kingston in August.

MASSIVE SEWAGE DUMPING by the City of Kingston over the past several days.

The dumping of the past few days has exceeded the tally for all of 2007 by a considerable margin.

Dumping for 2008 year-to-date is way ahead of ALL of 2006 and 2007 combined.

Word from the Dolphins Scuba club is, at West Street, this is a visibly nasty flow of immense quantities of fecal matter, toilet paper and sanitary supplies.

Shame on the City of Kingston for its massive spending on things like OHL arenas, squares, and theatres, and so today we continue to despoil a natural lake.

No word yet about this from local mainstream media.

Finally, shame on Utilities Kingston for placing this information way down on their combined sewer overflows bypass log.

When you look at the initial viewpane for that page, you see nothing recent worthy of note. You need to scroll way down to see the real news.

They call it a "bypass log". It's nothing like a bypass log. It's a selective and obfuscated tally, with no links to details.

Related: don't barf when you read this.

DOLPHINS DECLARE THIS LAKE OPEN.

HUB STEENBAKKERS DESIGNATED AS A CERTIFIED MARINA MANAGER.

From Boating Industry Canada:

The CMM designation is a professional qualification and certification program assuring marina customers, investors, bankers, insurers and the public that marina properties are professionally managed and run. The award follows his completion of the Advanced Marina Management course, providing training in site planning, marina-development skills, marina-operation techniques, business strategies, risks and liabilities and environmental policies. Hub becomes only the 4th person in Canada and the 212th person in the world to attain this certification since the programs inception in 1992.

Hub owns and operates Collins Bay Marina.

POSTPONED: The Crew overboard! seminar, originally scheduled for March 28th, is postponed to May 31. The new programme will include on-water practice following the seminar.

LAKE ONTARIO PARK MASTER PLAN - TERMS OF REFERENCE is a 7-page report just released by the City staff for a committee meeting later this week.

The Terms of Reference for the next phase are focused on finding a viable way of putting in place the vision and planning principles agreed to in the visioning exercise. The Phase I Planning Study achieved its goal of reaching a consensus on the future of Lake Ontario Park. Phase 2 of the park redevelopment process has three objectives which are:

• To develop and recommend a multi-year strategic direction and plan for the revitalization and rejuvenation of the park as a public community facility;
• To ensure ongoing and inclusive community consultation throughout the development of the plan and the related implementation strategy; and
• To develop and recommend a long-term financing and budget strategy for the capital construction and operating costs necessary to implement and maintain the recommended development plan.

Totally unlike, say, City marinas.

Request for proposal: MARINA SUSTAINABILITY AND DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY AND BUSINESS PLAN (29 pages) released by The City of Kingston 9 days ago (March 10th).

But the RFP is still not posted on the City of Kingston Tenders, RFPs and RFIs web page.

Update: The RFP was finally posted sometime after 3:30 PM on March 19th.

When it comes to City Marinas we've seen BS like this before.

NOTES FROM THE TELECONFERENCE held yesterday evening, March 18th, 2008 which was very well run by the International St Lawrence River Board of Control from a central meeting place in Rochester.

Thanks to Mike Hill of the Dolphins for providing the notes.

THE PRESERVE OUR WRECKS, KINGSTON BLOG was just launched today.

This is the first post to what I hope will become an active and informative resource for everyone interested in respecting and protecting the maritime heritage of Kingston, Ontario and neighbouring waters.

Mike Hill

Mike is also one of the folks behind the truly excellent Kingston Dolphins Scuba Club Blog.

Don't be surprised to see the important work of Preserve Our Wrecks brought squarely to the forefront of the ongoing public conversations about our waterfront.

THE MARCH 2008 ISSUE OF THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is online. Several interesting articles including Gananoque Inn, and Where Have ALL the Shorelines Gone?.

FROM METALCRAFT MARINE NEWS: A new TV series on Global-TV titled The Guard features, in a very big way, a 47-foot MetalCraft Marine-built search and rescue motor life boat.

From the MetalCraft website:

The aluminum MLB is a 26 knot self-righting seach and rescue craft designed for Sea State 8.

CITY OF KINGSTON REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL for partial dock replacement of "B" Dock at Confederation Basin Marina.

Interestingly this item apparently doesn't appear in the marinas section of the 2007-08 Municipal Capital Budget.

A a six-year Confederation Basin refurbishment program began in 2006.

THE KINGSTON AND DISTRICT SPORTS HALL OF FAME WEBSITE is online, featuring 111 inductees since its establishment in 1996.

You might prefer its Wikipedia article if being spoon-fed the list 20-inductees at a time isn't your bag.

Of the 111 inductees, just 6 have been elected for performance in, or contributions to, waterfront-related sports and, of those, just 2 are inducted as athletes.

Here's the Nominations page.

WE ALL NEED CERTAINTY...AND A SWIMABLE, DRINKABLE, FISHABLE KINGSTON is a wrap of recent Lake Ontario Waterkeeper activity in the area, including the Lafarge tire-burning issue.

Bet you didn't know that Lake Ontario Waterkeeper started in Kingston.

A STUNNING DESKTOP IMAGE from Ian Coristine, available for download in the following screen sizes: 1152 x 864, 1280 x 800 or 1680 x 1050.

The best story which also explains its location will earn a set of 6 prints.

Read more on the photography of Ian Coristine, who's been capturing the Thousand Islands region for more than 15 years.

Related: the photos festooned throughout the Thousand Islands Life e-zine.

SILVER for Canada's Oskar Johansson and Kevin Stittle at the Tornado Worlds in New Zeland.

Ahead: Hyeres (April), Medemblik (May), Kiel (June) and Qingdao for the Olympic regatta in August.

THIS YEAR'S LIST OF KINGSTON'S NOTABLE SAILING REGATTAS is looking very good indeed.

KYC is hosting EYC for keelboats in July, and CORK has posted this list of 2008 regattas booked so far:

World Championships

Contender Worlds (August 16 - 23)

North American Championships

Laser (August 16 - 20)

Laser Radial (August 16 - 20)

29er (August 16 - 20)

470 (August 17 - 20)

Flying Dutchman (August 21 - 24)

49er (August 21 - 24)

Canadian Championships

Contender (August 16 - 17)

F18 (August 21 - 24)

Albacore (September 19 - 21)

49er (August 21 - 24)

The last time Kingston hosted so many North American Championships was in 1999.

Is there a city in Canada that hosts more international sporting championships than Kingston?

A CHALLENGE FROM COLLINS BAY MARINA in support of the International Water Levels Coalition (IWLC).

The IWLC is a citizens group that acts as a watchdog and advocate on water level issues to the International Joint Commission (IJC) and International St. Lawrence River Board of Control (ISLRBC).

The IWLC mission is tremendously important, but their membership, especially in Canada, is quite small. This year, Collins Bay Marina took steps to help expand that membership and strengthen their voice on our behalf.

The challenge is to other marinas and clubs to urge their members to support the IWLC.

We would like to challenge each marina, association, boating business and yacht club on the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario to mount a similar membership drive for the IWLC. Aware citizens, active in making our needs known to government, are the only route we have to protecting our waters, our recreation and our businesses.

Read the challenge and sign-up to become a IWLC member (Cost: $10).

THE 1000 ISLANDS POKER RUN is currently scheduled for Friday and Saturday August 8-9.

That's just two days, compared to last year's 3-days.

As usual, it overlaps with the CORK PHRF and One-Design Keelboat Regatta, which makes no sense whatsoever.

It is also immediately prior to the CORK Optimist Dinghy Championship, when lots of youth sailors are on the water practicing. For many young sailors and their parents, it's an obnoxious introduction to Kingston's waterfront.

• This Friday, February, 22, 2008, from 2:00-3:00pm, Waterkeeper brings its weekly radio show - Living at the Barricades - to The Grad Club in Kingston, ON. Very special guests and musicians will join hosts Mark Mattson and Krystyn Tully for an exciting and inspiring live broadcast entitled: "Beyond the Barricades: The promise of a swimable, drinkable, fishable Kingston."

  Free Admittance. Please join us!
  162 Barrie St. in Kingston, 2:00-3:00pm
  Contact: Avi Grand (Producer)
  barricades@waterkeeper.ca

• Saturday February 23, Waterkeeper will have a booth at the Kingston Regional Sports and Entertainment Centre where The Tragically Hip will play the venue's first live concert. Enter a draw for a signed Kingston Frontenacs jersey, pick up a copy of At the Barricades: Volume 1, chat with Waterkeeper staff, and enjoy the show!

DECAYING SPY SATELLITE USA 193 was shot-down by the US military on Wednesday night.

Just two and a half orbits prior to its scheduled demise, USA 193 had a 1.3 magnitude visible pass almost directly over Kingston.

To the right is USA 193's location just after the pass.

THE FEBRUARY 2008 EDITION OF THOUSAND ISLANDS LIFE is online with, as usual, some stunning photographs.

Notable articles this month include Ghosts of Fort Henry, Elusive Eels, and Island Names.

Looking back in the archive we see in January: Sinking a Scuba Mecca about HMCS Terra Nova, New Gananoque Boat Museum which is on hold, and Low Water.

Excellent.

LAKE ONTARIO WATER LEVELS are looking good again, especially considering all the snow on the ground in the Great Lakes basin.

Currently Lake Ontario levels are about average for this time of year, after a period of abnormally low water last fall.

The good news is Lake Ontario levels are 10-inches above predictions from three months ago.

The bad news: the big lakes upstream are still far below their seasonal averages. Lake Superior is 10-inches below average, and lakes Michigan and Huron are about 20-inches low.

CARTWRIGHT POINT IS ON COUNCIL AGENDA for the Tuesday February 5th meeting.

The purpose of the application is to allow the adjustment of property boundaries with the effect of reducing the number of lots from 37 lots to 14 parcels in order to recognize the location of homes, water wells, septic systems and vehicle paths. Lots are being merged, lot lines are being adjusted and rights-of-way are being created. No new homes or building lots are being created. However, the legal descriptions of the properties will result in a form that is suitable for convenient conveyance.

That's really sweet waterfront, right there.

There's a sweetner involved, though why it's there isn't mentioned. Moreover its location isn't marked in the exhibits.

The Owner also proposes to donate a parcel of land to the City in order to allow access to the shore line of Deadman's Bay. The site is acceptable to the Parks Department.

CONTENDER WORLDS 2008 is a new blog about the International Contender Class world championship regatta which will be held here this August.

Their dates are:

• August 16-17 - Contender Canadians
• August 18 - Measurement
• August 19-23 - Contender Worlds

Here are the results for the 2001 Contender Worlds in Kingston which was a 31-boat event won by Arthur Brett of Australia, with the top North American finishing 14th.

IT'S NOT TOO COLD TO DIVE, or to partake in an ice diving course.

NOTICE FROM THE CITY about the expansion of the Point Pleasant water treatment plant.

A Public Information Centre will be held at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour Press Lounge from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, January 30, 2008, to allow the public to meet the project team, discuss the study objectives and to receive comments and input.

See also What's behind and under these ugly buildings? from April 2007, and the Urban Area Water Supply Master Plan which is a comprehensive overview with many interesting charts and diagrams.

KEDCO'S KINGSTON ONTARIO WATERFRONT WEBSITE IS BACK ONLINE.

Here's the current home page.

Your tax dollars at work; five-figure dollars worth.

Apparently nothing's changed since last November when this first came to light, then immediately taken offline.

It would be interesting to find out: who is well-served by misleading potential visitors to Kingston?

Note the adult and two kids, in a what appears to be a 15-foot canoe, mid-Harbour at dusk in imminent weather. Seriously, how improbable is that? How wise is that?

International-14 class sailboats haven't actively sailed here for quite some time; all "14" sailboats come here from out-of-town, and they are here maybe one-weekend a year. The boat pictured here is Toronto-based, shown in no-wind, flat-calm conditions, which is insulting, a bit like picturing a slalom skier in a farmer's field.

Underwater here isn't blue, it's green or, if anything, it's dark green. There's blue-water diving, but certainly not anywhere near here.

Adding just one more link-button to that web page looks very expensive. Guess how many files you'd need to touch to add another little box to the left of the canoe.

Is the KEDCO "blue belt" website like other websites KEDCO isn't able to maintain?

Take a guess: what percentage of visitors to Kingston ever get their feet wet in Kingston Harbour? A single-digit percentage? One-in-fifty, perhaps?

Take another guess: what percentage of Kingston residents ever get their feet wet in Kingston Harbour over the course of a typical year?

Do you suppose it might be because of fundamental waterfront inaccessibilities that exist here? Just who is KEDCO trying to kid?

It's one thing to try and lure visitors here, but it's quite another to be overtly dishonest about what we really have to offer.

The movers behind this "blue belt" website, Ross Cameron, Don Curtis, and KEDCO, are the very same folks who thought putting the LVEC on waterfront, expropriating MetalCraft Marine, totally eliminating Kingston Marina, and comandeering part of Fluhrer Park for the LVEC was a fine idea.

A TOKEN PARK IDEA from a reader. This is downtown Budapest, on the Danube.

At the moment, the plan for Token Park is for a large rubble-rock shoreline, which is inaccessible, ugly, and ubiquitous around here.

In addition to adding a real sense of connection to the water, steps would make Token Park a little bigger, and opens the possibility of using the large, wide-open anchorage as a staging area, or as a competition area complete with viewing stands of sorts.

More on Token Park here.

THE AGM OF PRESERVE OUR WRECKS, KINGSTON is to be held at 1 pm on Sunday, March 2nd in the Ft Henry Room of the Day's Inn at Hwy 401 off Division St.

Light refreshments will be served to members attending.

THE ONTARIO SAILING AGM, held at the Toronto Boat Show last weekend, brought some good news and accolades for sailors from Kingston:

• The Kingston Yacht Club was named as one of three province-wide High Performance Centres and Centres of Excellence. This is an effort to raise the bar and provide a better service to athletes and help them achieve their goals with the ultimate goal of the association to graduate sailors to the National Olympic Team.
• Robert Davis (his biography here) of the Kingston Yacht Club was named 2007 Youth Sailor of the Year.
• Corey Lynam of the Kingston Yacht Club is the 2007 recipient of the Angus (Bud) Roulstone Leadership Award, presented to a (current) certified CYA Instructor/Coach who has shown exceptional leadership in a learn-to-sail or racing program.

AN EVENING OF CANOE STORIES WITH JAMES RAFFAN, is a free lecture sponsored by the Friends of Frontenac Park, on Thursday February 7th in the Wilson Room, Kingston Frontenac Public Library, Central Branch, 130 Johnson Street, at 7 pm. All are welcome.

James Raffan is a respected author and outdoor educator who has written and edited numerous best-selling books, including " Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canadian Canoeing Tradition" and " Deep Waters".

The canoe stories will be about Herb Pohl and Sir George Simpson, two iconic Canadian canoeists who are the subjects of " The Lure of Faraway Places: Reflections on Wilderness and Solitude" and "Solitude and Emperor of the North", his two most recent books, published in 2007

TOKEN PARK CONCEPT PLANS have finally been posted on the City website.

Download the Phase 1 concepts and the Phase 2 concepts.

Observation: You've got to love how this city does business.

• It plans a public meeting with no documents posted online beforehand.
• At the meeting, attendees must queue to have a brief chance to look at diagrams.
• Then attendees must sit-through the orchestrated sales-pitch.

By not posting plans before the meeting, this assures an unprepared and uninformed audience at the meeting, all the better minimize the chance of derailing pre-conceived development plans.

This is really how our waterfront got so ruined: one step at a time. That's how Block-D got stuffed with tall buildings, and that's how the rest of us ended-up with a token-park.

Here we have a "proposed marina building" with no connection whatsoever to the marina. The foot of the nearest dock, on the west-side of the Radisson Hotel, is 245 m away. The foot of the main docks, on Clarence Street, is over 520m away. That's going to be a great marina building, don't you think?

Here is detail of the juncture between Token Park and the stone breakwater that surrounds Confederation Marina. Note the utter lack of vision: there's plenty of usable space on the stone breakwater. Waterfront cities world-wide that "get it" have piers and breakwalls people can walk on. But in Kingston? Nah! Token Park is really a dog park, a place where the condo owner's pets can "go", nevermind that there's acres of great waterfront space out on the stone breakwall.

ACCOUNT OF THE TOKEN PARK (BLOCK-D) PUBLIC MEETING in Thursday's Whig Standard.

Update: Here's a transcript of an item titled Block Park from CKWS-TV News.

FRIENDS OF THE PHOEBE 10TH ANNIVERSARY, Sunday January 27th, 2-4, at the Kingston Public Library, Johnson Street.

Music, Silent Auction, Exhibits, Refreshments, Door Prizes, anniversary gift for every ticket holder.

Tickets $5.00 per person, phone 613-4154 or at the door.

STILL IN PLANNING: This is not new, but a reminder about three waterside 100-meter wind turbines being proposed for the Invista property at 455 Front Road. This item appears on the agenda for the next City of Kingston Planning Committee meeting.

It seems surprising that, in the context of the large Invista plant and the location of the turbines, that a noise report would be required here.

MOVIE TRAILER FOR ST-LAWRENCE II, THE MOVIE
(turn-up the audio).

It's a soon-to-be-released documentary about Brigantine Inc's St-Lawrence II.

Also visit The Brigantine's donations page. In addition to cash donations, they can use all of the follwing things that might be cluttering your home or office:

• laser printer, TV & VCR for classroom, digital slide projector
• sextant, 3-arm protractors (x 4)
• paint, line, flashlights, buckets, scrub brushes, sand paper, and flares.

Update: The sound track in the trailer is Sleepy Maggie by Ashley Macisaac.

A PUBLIC MEETING ABOUT TOKEN PARK (BLOCK D) is to be held January 16, 2008, Memorial Hall, City Hall, 7 p.m.

There's nothing new on the City website other than the meeting announcement. Nonetheless,

Written comments will be received at blockdpark@cityofkingston.ca until Friday, Feb. 15.

Here's the only concept ever posted on the Internet.