Spring clean

A beautiful day with a cloudless sky and 18ºC in the shade. We had a spring clean at the Rockcliffe Flying Club and some of the 100 members of the Rockcliffe Yacht Club, just down the hill from the airport (the access road doubling as a floatplane ramp at times) were scrubbing the decks of their premises, too.

From the wikipedia entry for the RYC ...

The club originally was part of CFB Rockcliffe but changed to a private club when the base transferred the ramp and river bank to the National Capital Commission in 1984. The club is centred on a concrete ramp originally used to launch sea planes. The ramp extends 50ft into the water, as when the ramp was built, in the 1930s, the level of the Ottawa river was much lower. In 1964, a dam was put across the Ottawa River for the Carillon Generating Station which raised the water level by 9 ft. As a result, the Rockcliffe Yacht Club has one of the best launching ramps on the Ottawa river.

From the old photo, above, presumably taken from a Rockcliffe based aircraft in 1936, the old floatplane mooring station can clearly be seen. Nowadays it's used for people's private yachts, and floatplanes must be tied down in the water a hundred metres or so upstream from the ramp.

The old buildings in the picture have gone and new ones have sprung up in their place. My friends and I beautified a couple of flower beds along the walls of our new maintenance hangar today.

Once the docks are in place (stored on shore for the duration of the winter) the next job at the Yacht Club, in May, is to launch the boats, after which the sailors can finally do what they must have been longing to do all winter.

Yacht on the river, August 2009