Friday 14 August 2009

Tombstoning in Thanet

The youth of Thanet has dived off of our piers for as long as anyone I know can remember and although the harbour authority here in Ramsgate are employing several security guards to try and stop this it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Of course at one time we had the marina swimming pool with associated diving facilities, the other picture is of the diving board at Herne Bay in which is how towns that didn’t have a marina solved the problem. Well at the moment we are spending a great deal of taxpayers money inadequately policing our youth, who after all only want to engage in a healthy sporting activity.

My question here is why not pay people to operate proper diving stations instead?

The video is of Broadstairs last week.





Click here for today’s BBC news report about this.

Click here for a few pictures of Ramsgate Harbour taken today, it was far too early for the youth of today to be about, I also noticed that the BBC article seems to have changed its emphasis from Thanet to Folkestone.

6 comments:

  1. Felixstowe used to have anchored floating raft diving platforms. Swim out to the deep water .. press up on to the platform .. climb up to the board and dive back in to the sea. I suppose the health and safety people would have a fit at them nowadays.

    What swim offshore to deep water just to dive !!! And no lifeguards.

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  2. Sadly, a young man was killed a few years ago tombstoning off Broadstairs Pier having broken his neck. Also I know of a slightly older man who was killed diving off the promenade at Westgate while under the influence of alcohol, leaving a wife and young family.

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  3. A very good question. Broadstairs used to put a temporary structure in place for their swimming gala in the 1950 / 60's as well as a couple of rafts.
    My dream development for the Merry England site would be a pool similar to the RNLI one at Poole. Add a helicopter ditching tank and you start to get a real white knuckle experience. Also it would be open all the year round.

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  4. Yep get the marina swimming pool rebuilt it will solve a lot of problems.

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  5. 1974 was when the marina swimming pool was closed.Build a water park a.s.a.p.with diving boards!

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  6. Michael, on your stroll did you notice the damage to the lighting caused by the "innocent" divers, when they get bored? All have to be repaired with local taxpayers money.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.