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.

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.

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.

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 FRESH MAKEOVER for the CORK website.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The WOLFE ISLAND WIND PROJECT ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW REPORT is online.

There are several very interesting attachments to the report. Among them:

• Simulation of Wake Effect Distances which includes the positioning of our traditional regatta circles. It'll be interesting to see the racing effect on wind in the boat channel, South of Simcoe Island. Before the wind project, given the tactical choice, this was typically the preferred route in and out of the harbour.
• The Submarine Cable Preferred Route lands in Sand Bay, which is good news for one of our best wave sailing Spots in Kingston Harbour.
• Watercourses Requiring Permanent Vehicle Crossings.
• Distribution of Raptors, Owls and Snow Buntings, 2005.
• Several updated visual impact assessments, like this predicted view from Fort Henry:

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.

MIKE KALIN OF KINGSTON won the 40-boat Laser class at the 3-day CORK Fall Regatta which wrapped-up today.

Update: With a 10th place overall and top youth finish, Robert Davis of Kingston qualifies to represent Canada at the Volvo Youth Sailing ISAF World Championship, July 10-19th 2008, in Aarhus, Denmark.

Robert finished 14th at this summer's Youth Worlds here in Kingston.

Update: Read CYA head coach Ken Dool's regatta report.

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.

CORK BLOGGING: Here are links to competitors, volunteers, and spectators blogging about CORK. This beats the Kingston Whig Standard, which has had almost zero coverage so far, and the CORK website, which has a "News" link with no recent news to be found there.

• Andrew Campbell, who recently won a gold medal for the USA in the Laser class at the Pan-Am Games: Monday Morning Tactician: 13 August 2007 about the importance of long-view weather checking before a competition like CORK.
• John Pearce, a US Olympic sailing hopeful (he placed 4th at US Laser Nationals), posted an item titled Training Camp in Kingston on Wednesday.
• Jenny, a CORK volunteer, posted an item titled CORK Sailing yesterday. It sounds like Jenny would love to do more actual sailing. Reading downward, she also volunteered for the Kingston Triathlon. Jenny's evidently a giver.
• Monika's Adventures has an August 11th post titled CORK, Canadian Olympic Regatta Kingston. Monica also had a recent post titled International Sailing in Kingston about volunteering for the ISAF Youth World Championships in July.

THE SHARK NORTH AMERICAN CHAMPIONSHIPS is a 35-boat competition.

Update: Winners are David O'Sullivan, David Foy, and Jamie Foy of Ottawa's Britannia Yacht Club. Top Kingston boat is Peter VanRossem, Gord Greer, and Peter VanRossem Jr in fourth position. Results here.

NATHAN BARON'S MINI TRANSAT SLOOP arrived in Kingston yesterday and was launched at Collins Bay Marina. Lots of photos on Flickr.

Nathan hopes to compete in the 2009 Mini Transat race between France and South America.

July 27 2007 UPDATE: Front-page story in The Whig-Standard.

THE FINAL DAY OF RACING AT THE VOLVO YOUTH SAILING ISAF WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS saw just one race as planned. Winds were very shifty from the Nortwest that, at times when competitors were on water, gusted to thirty knots and above. Results here.

THE 2007 VOLVO YOUTH SAILING ISAF WORLD CHAMPIONS

Boy’s One Person Dinghy: Laser (Pavlos Kontides, Cyprus)
Girl’s One Person Dinghy: Laser Radial (Gabrielle King, AUS)
Boy’s Two Person Dinghy: 29’er (Henrik Sogaard, Soren Kristensen, DEN)
Girl’s Two Person Dinghy: 29’er (Emily Dellenbaugh, Briana Provancha, USA)
Boy’s Windsurfer (Pierre Le Coq, FRA)
Girl’s Windsurfer (Laura Linares, ITA)
Open Multihull: Hobie Cat 16 Race Spinnaker (Richard Glover, Andrew Glover, GBR)

Our List Of Major Regattas In Kingston has been updated with these seven new world champions.

A DAY ON THE LIGHT-SIDE: Here's what iWindsurf.com recorded for wind on Day 4 of the ISAF Volvo Youth Worlds.

If you are in VHF radio range of Kingston Harbour, and are able to listen-in, here are the channels for Volvo Youth Worlds regatta.

• Orange course (VHF 10): Skiffs and Cats.
• Blue course (VHF 72): Boards
• Yellow course (VHF 69): Lasers

Results here.

Highlight of Day 4: A bullet and a 2nd for Isabella Bertold of Canada in Girls Laser Radial who sits in 5th with three more races to sail.

Canada is tied for 13th overall for the Volvo Trophy which, at the top, is a 3-way race betweem Australia, Denmark, and New Zeland. Looking down from there, the UK is 6th and the USA is 7th.

AFTER RACING DAY TWO AT THE ISAF YOUTH WORLDS, we can start to say the regatta's eventual winners will have really earned it.

Winds started West and fair but it picked up and backed suddenly around 11:30am and, by first guns at noon it was snorting. It mostly built from there.

Yellow Course was set at 245 degrees, and that never changed. By session's end around 2:30pm, with gusts close to 30 at times and with carnage looming, they called it a day. Another good call.

Results here. Best Canadian after Day 2 is David Hayes of Toronto, currently in a podium position in Boys Windsurfer thanks to a bullet in the last race today.

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?

RESULTS FROM THE 505 Canadians, Kingston's first notable sailing regatta of 2007, are finally up. Winners were Americans Tyler Moore and Jessie Falsone.

More: Kingston's regatta history is updated.

GEOFF WEBSTER has been photographing sailing in Kingston, including CORK, for over 25 years.

He's just self-published a booklet of 50 photos, taken from over 80,000+ in his collection, titled SAIL KINGSTON -- Fresh Water Sailing Capital Of The World.

He also has collections of photos from CORKs-past available on DVD, and these may be purchased by contacting Geoff at

Geoff Webster
Photographer
613-354-3569
PhotoOne@ihorizons.net

THE PROVINCE PROVIDES $80,000 FOR THE ISAF VOLVO YOUTH WORLDS REGATTA, just two weeks before the start of the event, which is cutting it pretty close.

Worth noting: THE KINGSTON DRAGON BOAT FESTIVAL is coming up, on Saturday, June 9th, 2007.

BYM SAILING & SPORTS: Volvo Youth Worlds another chapter for Kingston sailing history. BYM is based in San Francisco.

Kingston really has an impressive sailing history; it's an international sporting events tradition to match or surpass any other city or town in Canada.

The VOLVO YOUTH WORLDS ENTRY SUMMARY shows 227 competitors and 81 coaches from 52 countries. The visiting countries with the largest teams are:

• Brazil 13
• Denmark 13
• France 13
• Great Britian 13
• Germany 13
• Italy 13
• New Zealand 13
• Australia 12
• Singapore 12
• United States 12

WHAT'S BEHIND AND UNDER THESE UGLY BUILDINGS?

Should someone be made to answer for these?

Here's the project that put them there.

Also, click the various images and diagrams for larger versions.

If you read the public documents, there's apparently no reference to the ugly bunkers.

Interesting: Here is how the major pipes connect. Our sewers and our waterfront are inexorably linked.

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.

KINGSTON'S 2007 VOLVO YOUTH SAILING ISAF WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP REGATTA WEBSITE is slowly evolving.

The Notice of Race is now online. Expect Section 12 to generate considerable flak from team leaders, coaches and parents.

Which doesn't appear to square with Section 15:

TALL SHIP IN TOWN: The dock of the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes will be graced by the 179-foot barque Picton Castle between Aug 31st and Sept 4th. The barque will be hosting a cargo sale Friday and Saturday 11-7, and Sunday and Monday 10-6.

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.

CORK STARTS: Today is the first day of CORK, and it starts with the CORK Offshore event for larger keelboats.

The April 2006 CORK-Sail Kingston Newsletter is out.

Also, in their semi-regular email newsletter, CORK announces that they have ordered three new Triumph model 170CC support boats with money they received from the Trillium Foundation.

Two Kingston-area boats recently sailed in the Olson 30 US Nationals and in the Olson 30 class at the light-air Land's End NOOD regatta in Florida. Both events were hosted by the St. Petersburg Yacht Club.

Surely we're not the only ones who missed the release of the December 2005 CORK Newsletter. Among the interesting items in the two pages are:

• The Trillium Foundation has provided over $50,000 towards the purchase of three new race support boats.
• Marianne Davis is CORK's new general manager.
• The City of Kingston has received a grant from the Government of Canada to refurbish Portsmouth Olympic Harbour which will include fixing-up the existing ramps, adding new ramps, and refurbishing docks.