Big Sandy Bay

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.

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.

Someone created a Google KITEBOARDING KINGSTON - RIDING MAP. Big Sandy Bay is mis-identified, but the rest is great.

For example:

PUC Dock

Kingston's most popular summer launch site, good from east through west on the south side of the compass, best in SW winds...but it really comes to life in a true west once the swell gets bigger and cleans up a bit. Best catagorized as "bump and jump" with a nice little carvatorium on the inside at the pipe.

Though this is a very accessible launch it is an intermediate level spot at least. There is a slight current, and limited landing spots downwind. Jump off the dock to launch, but make sure you make it in before the last little beach upwind of the hospital! If you miss that your best bet is to ride it out and come in WAAAAY downwind at the base of Fort Henry. Not a bad planned downwinder for those on the early stages of the learning curve. Bring a quarter and call a cab from the pay phone at the entrance to the fort to get back to the PUC docks.

Wild.

Related: Here's a Google Earth File of Lake Ontario Windsurf Spots compiled by Evan Wamsley.

Have you noticed how Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, dominates Google search result pages?

For example, consider these Google search results:

• Google "Kingston, Ontario", and Wikipedia ranks as the first entry after the City of Kingston's website, and ahead of all the websites belonging to Queen's, Fort Henry, CFB Kingston, KEDCO, all the hotels, all real-estate brokers, the Chamber of Commerce, all the other directories, everthing.
• Googling Queens University returns Wikipedia as the first Canadian non-Queen's entry.
• Googling Royal Military College: Wikipedia ranks second behind the RMC website.
• Wolfe Island returns Wikipedia in fifth spot, but still ahead of 312,995 others.

Like it or not, Google considers Wikipedia as authoritative. When someone wants a general overview of something notable, Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start.

It is therefore in our interest to ensure that Wikipedia articles about notable things in our midst exist, are rich and accurate, are properly categorized and linked, and thereafter are watched in perpetuity.

Our waterfront is woefully underrepresented in Wikipedia. That needs to change.

So pick a notable piece of your physical environment and see to documenting it in Wikipedia. It won't cost you a dime, and it will get viewed far more, and be trusted far more, than almost anything else you can do on the web, at any price.

BEACH REPORT 2007 is a 36-page PDF just released by Lake Ontario Waterkeeper.

Seven of the Kingston-area beaches are covered in the report:

• Richardson Beach (they call it "Murney Tower")
• Grass Creek
• Rotary Park, (incorrectly identified as part of "Collins Bay Marina")
• Lemoine Beach
• Arrowhead Beach
• Crerar Beach
• Everitt Beach
• Lake Ontario Park (they call it "Lake Ontario Municipal Beach")

Oddly Big Sandy Bay, one of Lake Ontrario's most beautiful beaches, isn't included.

Many of the observations arise from the abject neglect by our municipality for our beaches.

That's not the only beach-related thing that's neglected by the City.

On August 24th we were pleased to report that FINALLY WE HAVE AN ONLINE BEACH REPORT.

But our fears were well-founded: as it turns out, that online beach report is just another web page the City is unable to properly maintain. There has been no update in the two months since August 24th when the information was first posted.

NOW PUSHBACK against the Wolfe Island Wind Project, via CKWS-TV.

It's one thing to have issues that just can't be mitigated, like the Big Sandy Bay Wetland, for example. But it's quite another to whitewash them, which is being implied.