Clubs

KINGSTON'S 2012 MAJOR REGATTA PICTURE is much heavier this year than last.

One World Championship and four North American Championships are booked.

This summer's premier event, the Shark Worlds, is hosted by KYC at the end of August.

Our last Worlds' was the Byte CII Worlds in 2009. So it's been awhile

CORK still lists the Byte CII World Championships in June but that regatta won't happen.

More details in our list of major regattas in Kingston.

KINGSTON'S 2011 MAJOR REGATTA PICTURE looks light this year.

No Worlds' and four North American Championships booked so-far.

Our last Worlds' was the Byte CII Worlds in 2009.

Not included in the 2011 tally is the Canadian Lightning Class Pan-Am Trials, July 1-3 hosted by KYC, which is the summer's first and possibly most hotly contested.

More details in our list of major regattas in Kingston.

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.

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.

KYC PHOTOS now being shared on Flickr.

UPDATES from the KYC Race Team:

• Mid Ontario’s
• Laser and Radial Training Camp
• 29er Canadians and Clinic

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It's a pretty good list, all things considered.

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?

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.

THE ORANGE BOWL INTERNATIONAL YOUTH REGATTA RESULTS show Greg Clunies and Robert Davis, both sailing for KYC, finishing 5th and 7th respectively in a 40-boat fleet, with each scoring a bullet in the 9-race series.

The CFB KINGSTON DOLPHIN SCUBA CLUB remains very active with diving throughout the winter.

Yesterday, for example, members dove off the Kingston Yacht Club during the day and then practiced in the KMCSC pool in the evening.

The Dolphins regularly post accounts and photos on their blog, and they occasionally update their photo gallery on Flickr which has, among other things, a photoset of members ice diving in Kingston Harbour last February.

Incidentally, though it's a military club, it's membership is open to all Kingston residents. A yearly associate membership costs $65.00 for civilians, $45.00 if you're between 14 and 21.

The CFB Kingston Dolphin Scuba Club is one of the truly great things about the Kingston waterfront. Active year-round, its members always seem to be collaborating with others on the waterfront, and they have been systematically sharing what they do, see, and find.

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.

NATHAN BARON has been working hard towards his goal of qualifying and sailing in next year's solo Transat 650 race. He's often out in Kingston Harbour practicing, and he recently completed a Toronto Training Run.

He's also documenting his journey with over 120 photos so far in this Flickr photoset.

Nathan plans an "Open Boat" event on October 21st from 1-3pm at KYC where people can come down to see the boat up-close and get a taste of what life aboard a mini is like.

A SCAN FROM THE PAST: You are looking at a small-sized scan of the navigation chart created for the 1976 Olympic Sailing events (or Yachting as it was then known).

Olympic sailing was hosted in Kingston and it remains, 31 years later, the pinnacle of Kingston's impressive regatta history.

Click to see:

• medium (500 x 447 pixels),

• large (1024 x 915 pixels), and

• original (5969 x 5333 pixels) sizes of this chart.

The chart shows several very interesting things:

• The sailing events were held way out in Lake Ontario, southwest of Simcoe Island. The racing area was a full 5-miles from P.O.H., and Course Charlie, used for Tornado class catamarans, was another 5-miles beyond that.

• The racing area was bounded by 52 orange spar buoys.

• Within the racing area, near its southern edge, there was something called Bedford Tower which isn't there anymore. Whatever it was, there was a 300m exclusion zone around it.

• Note the detailed bathymetry of Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, and the layout of the site for the Olympic event.

• Also see how, prior to the 1984 expansion of Confederation Basin, Kingston Harbour was dotted with many spar buoys leading to the Lasalle Causeway along Carruthers Shoal. Old-time dinghy sailors will remember these well, as they served as ideal boathandling practice marks.

Thanks to David Page, KYC archivist, who supplied the chart used to create these digital versions.

THE IOM CLASS EASTERN CHAMPIONSHIP REGATTA was hosted by KYC this weekend. It was a 42-race event involving 17 competitors from Ontario, Quebec, and northeast USA.

Due to the concurrent World Championships in France, participant numbers were such that they made just one fleet for all competitors.

Check out this 40-second YouTube video showing the start of race 42.

Make no mistake: radio controlled sailboat racing is serious stuff. See the See Kingston Yacht Club Radio Controlled Racing page for local information and, on a national level, see the The Canadian Radio Yachting Association website.

There are still SOME AVAILABLE SAILING CAMP SPOTS in August at the Kingston Yacht Club Sailing School and at the Collins Bay Yacht Club Sailing School. Pass the word.

IT WAS AN UNUSUAL DAY WIND-WISE for the Volvo Youth Worlds practice races, which were supposed to happen on three race circles in early afternoon.

A heck of a cell went through just before 9am, and it looked to be a fair day after that. But a sequence cells passed through around mid-day, and the wind built dramatically throughout the afternoon.

It turned into a classic Kingston buster, with the wind sensor at Kingston Yacht Club recording gusts to 40 knots. The competitors were on water for a short while, blasting around, but the practice races never happened. Good call.

Here is the trace of average wind from the Kingston Yacht Club. Anybody know why the pre-9am squall shows distinctively on the iWindsurf.com sensor, but not the Kingston Yacht Club sensor? Both sensors are mounted at the end of the pier of the Kingston Yacht Club. Maybe the squall was so brief there that it doesn't factor when averaged?

There's a NEW ALL-PURPOSE JUNIOR SQUADRON SHED at Kingston Yacht Club close to being complete. It will be used as a workshop for boat repairs on KYC's impressive dinghy fleet, sail storage, and can also serve as an activity room when the weather's poor.

Last year KYC renovated the boathouses on the East side of the property, along Simcoe Street.

It's good to see visible signs of upgrades on the waterfront.

The KINGSTON BOARDSAILING ASSOCIATION AGM is tonight, 7:30 PM, at the Kingston Yacht Club.

A good thing: Kingston Yacht Club is running a BOAT LOAN PROGRAM.

The KYC Junior Sailing program has a limited number of boats for racing-level kids who do not have their own boat.

Do you have a Laser gathering dust in your garage, or hiding under your deck? Do you have an Optimist that your kids no longer use? If so, and if you would be willing to loan, charter or otherwise make it available to our Junior Sailing kids, then please contact Chris Walmsley at lts@kingstonyachtclub.com.

This sounds like something worth supporting.

MINIMUS SAILING TEAM FUNDRAISER on Tuesday April 3 at 1900, at the Kingston Yacht Club in the Partridge room. Tickets are $10 at the door. Donations towards the Nathan Baron's Mini Transat campaign will be greatly appreciated. The speaker is Brian Hancock, veteran of three Whitbreads, maxi catamarans, and Open 50's among other things.

NATHAN BARON IS GOING FOR IT. At KYC on Wednesday evening, February 28th, Nathan Baron will be announcing and speaking about his upcoming campaign for the 2009 Mini Transat, a single-handed race from France to Brazil.

KYC'S 110 YEARS interesting story yesterday at CKWS-News about the celebration at Kingston Yacht Club marking its 110th anniversary, and the 30th anniversary of hosting the sailing competition of the 1976 Olympic Summer Games.

Here's another local waterfront blog, called A Sailor's Log, maintained by Nathan Baron, and billed as News, Events, and Stories from the Kingston Yacht Club.

At long last, the boathouses at Kingston Yacht Club are being renovated.

Over at Collins Bay Marina they're already launching boats. "This is the earliest we have ever started the season!" says Hub Steenbakkers, owner of Collins Bay Marina. "It is starting off to be a great season!".

Here are two views from the controllable Collins Bay Marina web cam which you can take for a spin at www.CollinsBayMarina.com/WebCam.html.

At other locations:

• Rideau Marina should begin launch activities in the next week or two, and
• Kingston Yacht Club launch day is April 29th.
• At Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, this afternoon they were hoisting-in the finger docks which winter ashore.

Both the Kingston Yacht Club and Collins Bay Yacht Club have updated their racing and social schedules for the coming months.

The April 2006 edition of the KYC Log is now online.

Here are pictures of the effects of today's big breeze at Kingston Yacht Club. Environment Canada reports gusts to 84 kmh, off the scale of our chart.

The December 2005 KYC Log has been posted.

The CFB Kingston Yacht Club has posted a (very) preliminary calender some of their 2006 events. Lift-in is Sunday May 14th which, as their home page points out, is a mere 150 days from now.

The Kingston Yacht Club has posted a list of its 2006 board of directors.

From the October KYC Log: The Kingston Yacht Club has been awarded the William Abbott Senior Trophy for 2005. The award goes to the top LTS program in Canada each year. This is a first for a learn-to-sail program in the Kingston area since the award was created in 1991. Clubs from Ontario have won this award 10 times in those 15 years.