Ramsgate Lifeboat open day this Sunday August 17th

As you see from the banner there is also a fishing boat race at 2pm, I will endeavour to get down there with my camera.

Vattenfall Ramsgate Week - Day 3

Today's racing was sponsored by Ramsgate Week's title sponsors, Vattenfall, the company responsible for the Thanet Wind Farm. The IRC fleet were treated to a long, 30 mile race, which took them on a ten mile run to a cardinal mark off the wind farm. All IRC fleets were competing for the Noot Cup. Once again, the wind was variable, ranging from five to fifteen knots and shifted in direction frequently.


IRC Class 1
In Class 1, Xwaves got off to a good start at the committee boat end of the line, with X-Tatic close behind. Peter Jackson's Icom Assassin started towards the pin end, with Koko Kai taking their start in the middle of the line. Icom Assassin rounded the first mark, two boat lengths ahead of Xwaves and Koko Kai, with the rest of the fleet following. The next leg was a ten mile run to South Thanet, a cardinal mark south of the Vattenfall wind farm. Icom Assassin and Xwaves went high and KoKo Kai lost some ground by sailing a deeper, more direct track. Icom Assassin got a new breeze, taking a horizon lead on the rest of the fleet. Xwaves extended their lead over Koko Kai, but two miles from the South Thanet Vattenfall Wind Farm mark, Koko Kai found the breeze and overtook Xwaves. Positions remained this way, with Icom Assassin's early lead further extended by a tidal gate to take line honours and the Link Cup. Xwaves took second place, with Ian Langston & Partners The Geek taking third place.


IRC Class 2
After a short beat to the Icom racing mark, the fleet set off on a ten mile downwind run to the South Thanet cardinal buoy, off the Vattenfall Wind Farm. The first Class 2 boat to round the mark was Richard Sparrow's J92 Who's to No, closely followed by, amongst others, Marine Diffusion Dunkerque, Expedite and Antix. Who's to No was first to the windward mark. A closely fought race between the Impala's Reaction and Scallywag II finally resulted in Reaction taking first place for the Shepherd Neame Trophy, followed by Who's to No second and Scallywag II third.


Noot Cup
The Noot Cup was the overall placing between the two IRC fleets. Peter Jackson's Icom Assassin (the fastest boat in the fleet) took first place, with Reaction, (one of the lowest rated boats in the fleet) sailed by John Barrett and Paul Woodward second and Mike and Jo Brand's X-35 Xwaves third.


IRC Mid Week Series Class Winners


IRC Class 1
Icom Assassin (Peter Jackson & Gary Shaffer)
Xwaves (Mike & Jo Brand)
Koko Kai (Alan Page)
IRC Class 2
Reaction (John Barrett & Paul Woodward)
Scallywag II (Peter Pearson & Barry Smith)
Antix (John Allen)


Cruiser Class 5 & 6
The Race Officer set a running start course down to Broadstairs Knoll, then to East Brake, down to Stonar and finish. At the start, the fleet split in two, with Magnum, Surprise, Toucan and Sunbird taking the inshore course, with Sydney II and the rest of the fleet going offshore. In the event, the offshore course paid off as they had more wind and Sydney 2 rounded Broadstairs Knoll first with the rest of the fleet following closely behind. Positions did not really change with a shy reach to East Break and a beat to Stonar. As the fleet was approaching Stonar, the tide changed making life difficult for the back end of the fleet.
In Class 5, Sydney II took line honours, but was beaten on handicap by Frank Martin's Surprise to win the Broadstairs Knoll trophy. Sydney II was second, followed by Arthur Freeman's J92 Jazz


In Class 6, Mirage took first place to win the Penguin Trophy with Rush in second place and Mallard third.


Trophies for the day and for the IRC Mid Week Series were presented at the Royal Temple Yacht Club by Mandy Broughton from Vattenfall.


Royal Temple Yacht Club, 6 Westcliff Mansions, Ramsgate, CT11 9HY, United Kingdom.

Vattenfall Ramsgate Week - Day 2

The second day of Vattenfall Ramsgate Week was sponsored by Jentex and attracted a competitive fleet of local and visiting boats.

The two IRC fleets sailed a short course. The race started in light north easterly winds, which became variable throughout the race until a southerly breeze filled in to bring the fleet home in glorious sunshine. The variable conditions and strong tides led to interesting racing and many boats had a share of the lead during the course of the race.

IRC Class 1
Peter Jackson's Icom Assassin had a good start in the Class 1 fleet. Kokokai launched their spinnaker out on the first leg and the rest of the fleet followed suit, but Mike Brand's Xwaves managed to get ahead and was first to the windward mark. The next leg started on a spinnaker run, with Icom Assassin and Tim Grigsby's X-Treme 25, X-Tatic carrying their asymmetrics. Xwaves sailed into a hole, with Icom Assassin overtaking and beating them to the next mark to lead the fleet home. The rest of the fleet suffered no wind and the placings remained the same for the remainder of the afternoon. X-Tatic caught Kokokai when the wind filled in at the end of the race, but didn't manage to catch up. Icom Assassin took line honours with Xwaves second and Kokokai third.

IRC Class 2
In Class 2, the Impala 28 Scallywag II was first to the weather mark, closely followed by Antix. Xpedite, Volante and Reaction reaching the mark at the same time. The next leg belonged to Antix and Expedite, both sailing well to Mark X. Volante, being the weather boat, skilfully managed to pick up the first of the south easterly breeze. Xpedite took line honours. It was a pleasure to see Phillipe Bourgeois 's Marine Diffusion Dunqurkue on the water, who had sailed from France the previous night and despite some slick sail handling, were unfortunate with the unpredictable wind early in the race. It was the Impala's that stole the day, with Volante (Paul Glover and Malcolm Flory) coming first on handicap, and Scallywag II and Reaction taking second and third place respectively.

Cruiser Class 5 & 6
The weather forecast today gave the race officer a difficult task; the wind was forecast to begin northerly, diminish and then swing round to the south. Knowing this, the race officer for the Cruiser fleet set a course down to B2, then to Rally Design and back via B2 with a loop to finish. His intention being to get round B2 before the tide and wind changed. This however was not to be, and the fleet arrived at B2 with only a few boats - Sydney II, Surprise and Magnum - managing to creep onto the bank before the tide changed. The fleet was stationary for two hours, but eventually the wind set in from the south and all boats got out of the tidal stream, either along the coast or the bank. By now Sydney II, Surprise and Toucan had rounded Rally Design and were heading home. The fleet then enjoyed some good racing for the remainder of the afternoon.

In Cruiser Class 5, Lance Stevens' Grand Soleil 50, Sydney II, took line honours, but was beaten on handicap by Surprise (Frank Martin), who took first place, with Arthur Freeman's J92, Jazz taking second place and Mick Ward's First 31.7, Toucan taking third.
S Jones' First Class 10, Mirage, took line honours in Cruiser Class 6, winning the race with Rush (Kenneth Lees) second and Mallard (Howard Bates) third.

Royal Temple Yacht Club, 6 Westcliff Mansions, Ramsgate, CT11 9HY, United Kingdom.

Birchington in the spot light.

I took a few snaps of Birchington this morning about 8am I now realise that I should have got there much earlier as there were far too many people and vehicles about getting in the way of the buildings.

I have a reprint of a Birchington book published by me for the first time coming out this week, more about that later, so I have Birchington very much on my mind at the moment.

Having just read my last post which seems to me in retrospect to be a bit of a chaotic ramble induced by trying to use the council’s website to some purpose, I can honestly say the pictures of Birchington aren’t much better, things getting I my way got on my nerves, here are the links to them.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts4/id11.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts4/id12.htm

Ha, but at least I finally got the crud out of my camera, broke all the rules and used methanol at first I thought I had finished it off as I used too much, but eventually discovered a very small amount that evaporates really quickly did the trick.

TDCIT and a few minor political spats on the blogs.

Cllr Clive Heart and Cllr Simon Moores have been making their views felt here http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2009/08/labour-shadow-team-comments-questions.html and here http://birchington.blogspot.com/2009/08/true-cost-of-it.html#comments about the cost of council IT.

All a bit party political, which from the point of view of the ordinary floating voter like myself it is a bit hard to grasp.

It usually boils down to all of Thanet’s problems are blamed on the local Tory administration by the Labour lot and the national Labour administration by the Tory lot.

When it comes to IT I think between them successive local and national administrations have stitched together so many rules and regulations as to make use of the internet as a means of communicating information to us, the local electorate, well nigh impossible.

They have also made it almost impossible to use recent assets that are available free to both business and private users.

As a Ramsgate shopkeeper the internet is petty much the only way I can access the council, when they are open so am I and their office in Ramsgate only allows me telephone access to officers that I could more easily phone from home.

This means that over the last few years I have used the council’s website and email server as a primary means of trying to find out what they are up to, frankly the experience hasn’t been a good one. If they had been a business I was trying to use, once I had discovered just how dreadful their IT was, I would have just used one of their competitors.

I suppose it was about 1998 that the minimum IT skills for anyone in my business moved from being able to send an email to being able to publish text and images to the internet.

It seems to have been at about this time that council officers outgoing internet activities were restricted to sending emails.

Delving the TDC website this morning one doesn’t start with a good impression, the search box, that doesn’t work properly, doesn’t display as it should in IE8 but floats on top of the council’s logo.

The youf of today had asked me about the night bus recently, I noticed an article about this on the TDC homepage. The article says the bus runs from 11pm to 3am on Friday and Saturday nights. The youf’s question being the latest one could get from Margate to Ramsgate, for a couple of quid, post party.

I clicked on the article to find out more about the night bus scheme, the link in it which takes you to a page on the TDC website that shows the timetable from 11 pm to midnight, not to 3 am as expected however there is a link there to the bus operators site for more info however if the info is there it certainly eluded me.

This is just an example of what I mean it equates to going onto my website clicking on a buy it now button and finding nowhere to pay.

I put this sort of thing down to the council officer that wrote the article not being able to post it directly, instead it goes of to the TDCIT department, gets posted with missing information, no one checks it as no one in the IT department would know what was wrong with it anyway.

Another example is that here we are with two major events this week Ramsgate week and Broadstairs Folk Week, information that is well hidden on the TDC website instead of splashed all over their homepage as one would expect.

At some point in the last ten years we passed, probably without knowing it, the point where the office worker that couldn’t use the internet reasonably well became unemployable.

In commerce and industry the goal posts are moving all the time, I speak from the relatively dated world of secondhand bookselling, in the shop this morning, the shops email accounts have been checked for spam, customers emails have been answered, Ebay, Amazon and ABE orders have been processed as have those from our own website.

Customers using the internet to buy books have used, credit cards, paypal, ABE, cheques and Amazon to pay us, all of this has been checked and the book orders packed for posting.

A new local title has been added to our website and linked up to a paypal “buy it now button” the fact of the matter is that were we not internet savvy the bookshop would have gone bust years ago.

Vattenfall Ramsgate Week - Day 1

Sunshine and a steady 15 knots of breeze greeted the competitors for the first day of Vattenfall Ramsgate Week. The week began with a mini coastal series, taking place from Monday to Wednesday for IRC Classes 1 and 2, with one race per day. Cruiser Classes are treated to one coastal race a day from Monday to Saturday, with courses taking them along the scenic coastline stretching from Sandwich to Botany Bay. Sponsors for the day are Aktrion and Business Computer Solutions

IRC Class 1

IRC Class 1 got off to a good start. Peter Jackson on Assassin took the seaward route and was first to the Deal Bank mark. Kokokai, the First 44.7, was four boat lengths behind. Deal Bank was a bare away and set, by which time the breeze was up to 20 knots, gusting 25 South Westerly. It was an exciting close reach from Deal Bank to Deal Dolphin and a broad reach spinnaker run from Deal Dolphin to Rally Design. After the Rally Design mark, the X35 Xwaves was the only boat that managed to hold their spinnaker to the next mark. It was a close reach to finish where Xwaves flew their spinnaker and closed the gap with Kokokai. By this time the wind was up to 30 knots. Kokokai took line honours in the three hour race. Kokokai won the race, with Xwaves coming a close second on corrected time and Assassin third.

IRC Class 2

IRC Class 2 began the race with a six mile foul tide beat. The first boat to round the windward mark was John Allen's X302 Antix, closely followed by the X99 Xpedite, with Reaction third. Class 2 enjoyed a long spinnaker run along the Sandwich Coast line. The race was won on corrected time by the Impala 28, Reaction sailed by Paul Woodward and John Barratt. Antix was second, with Scallywag II third.

Cruiser Classes 5 & 6

Both Cruiser Class 5 with the use of spinnakers prohibited and Class 6 with no sail restriction sailed the same course for the first day of Vattenfall Ramsgate Week. The course took them inshore to Stonar, before heading south down to Deal Dolphin. The wise half of the fleet decided to take inshore to take advantage of the slacker tide, splitting the fleet. There was a three knot tide at the Downs, and some boats round it hard to round the mark. The final leg took the fleet the inshore route to Rally Design, back down to Stonar and finish. The wind, at times, was up gusting up to 25 knots, which was more than forecast and there were some breakages in the fleet.

In Class 5 Lance Stevens' Grand Soleil 50 Sydney II took line honours to win the race, with Frank Martin's Dynamic 37 Suprise taking second place and Hugh Cripps Impala 28 Sunbird taking third.

Class 6 was won by Kenneth Lees Sigma 35 Rush, with Mirage and Mallard taking second and third respectively.

Competitors can enjoy the Happy Hour everyday in the club house from 18:00 to 19:00, courtesy of Shepherd Neame. There's live music tonight in the with 'One Love'.
Best wishes,

The Vattenfall Ramsgate Week Committee

Broadstairs Folk Week Thanet District Council miss web publicity again and a few other thoughts for today.

Folk Week stared yesterday and nothing on the council’s homepage, I am sure the council will have loads of reasons and excuses as to why it isn’t there, my own thoughts are perhaps because it isn’t in Margate.

Here is the link to The Broadstairs Folk Week website www.broadstairsfolkweek.org.uk it was all a bit quiet when I went over there earlier this morning, I will try and take some pictures over the weekend.

I tried to take a few of the market in Ramsgate yesterday but it was just too busy.

Talking to one of the chaps that clean the seafront and streets in Ramsgate this morning he raised a couple points that interested me. One was that there were several broken bottles in the pavilion area and the other was that several people had lit bar-b-cues under the part of the pavilion that faces the sea and is an open shelter.

Obviously both things are dangerous and need addressing in some way.

Labour Shadow Team comments & questions at Thursday evenings TDC Cabinet meeting.

INTRODUCTION - LABOUR GROUP LEADER - Cllr CLIVE HART

It was quite a short agenda at Thursday evenings TDC Cabinet meeting but I was pleased to see an excellent turn out by our Shadow Cabinet team. We were also joined by a very conscientious Cllr. Alan Poole who had serious concerns about open space in his Moses Montifiore ward. As always our members were ready to both assist and challenge whenever each proved necessary.

Cllr. Clive Hart - Phone: 01843 298770

Item 5 POTENTIAL ASSET DISPOSALS FOR 2009/2010 - Cllr. PETER CAMPBELL & Cllr. ALAN POOLE
Cllr. Campbell raised concerns about the substance and structure of a proposed report on the 99 year lease for Ramsgate Maritime Museum that would cover legal issues around the long length of time and whether it actually amounted to disposal.

Cllr. Campbell also raised concerns about land at Effingham Street in Ramsgate in relation to access for the fire service and provision of possible disabled parking for residents using local facilities.

Cllr. Peter Campbell - Phone: 01843 585738

Cllr. Alan Poole said he was pleased that TDC had finally seen sense and removed land at Montefiore from the process whilst the village green application was being discussed. He said it was green open space used by the community who had not only clearly spoken but also produced several petitions. Cllr. Poole was insistent that TDC should have withdrawn the open space from the list as soon as the village green application was made and that it will have to remove it completely when village green status is finally given.

Cllr. Alan Poole - Phone: 01843 602594

Item 6 SELF FINANCING CAPITAL INVESTMENT AT HARTSDOWN LEISURE CENTRE - Cllr. IRIS JOHNSTON

Cllr. Iris Johnston pointed to earlier plans to create such a facility back at the beginning of the decade and said she was concerned at how long it had taken to get to this stage and that it would now presumably cost considerably more.

Cllr. Johnston also asked about consultants costs which were reported to be £3,960 shared equally by TDC and Thanet Leisure Force and she also asked for a joint presentation to members from Leisure Force and Alliance Leisure.

Most importantly, Cllr. Johnston raised serious concerns about TDC being the guarantor for a Thanet Leisure Force loan of £1.62 million. There was a long debate between council officers concerning a previous legal case but eventually members were finally assured that all was in order as far as the Hartsdown project was concerned.

Cllr. Iris Johnston - Phone: 01843 299207
Item 8 UPDATED ICT STRATEGY & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT STRATEGY - Cllr. PETER CAMPBELLDespite promising to be brief, Conservative Cabinet member Cllr. Simon Moores gave a long and very laborious speech on this item. In it he also tried to make a political point about Government and the mismanagement of costs concerning IT systems.

Cllr. Peter Campbell also promised to be brief and he was. He simply pointed to 4.1.1 in the report being discussed which said 'The details of associated costs of the ICT Strategy have yet to be identified'.

Cllr. Campbell asked if Cllr. Moores had anything to say about a report which clearly showed his scheme was as yet uncosted?

There was a very long silence before Cllr. Moores fumbled together a feeble excuse of a reply!

Cllr. Peter Campbell - Phone: 01843 585738


Published by Thanet Labour Group Press Office - 44 Northdown Road, Margate, CT9 2RW.

Ed as I said the other picture of St Michael & St Bishoy Coptic Church in Northdown Road, I know this is a bit of a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour group and I have asked the Conservative group to come up with something on these meetings but no luck so far.