POW and Coast Guard Work Together Kingston Dive Boats Have Four More Sites To Visit This summer dive boats in the Kingston area have had four new shipwreck mooring blocks to tie up to thanks to the work of the Protect Our Wreck (POW) conservation group and the Canadian Coast Guard. In an effort to prevent dive boat anchor damage to historic dive sites, POW provides and maintains 23 moorings in Eastern Lake Ontario. This year, because the society was replacing mooring lines attached to the wrecks by placing very large concrete blocks on the lake bed, they were able to get the assistance of the Canadian Coast Guard ship Caribou Isle to put new mooring blocks in place near the remains of two historic schooners, a barque and one wooden steamer. "What POW volunteers had tried to do for years was accomplished in a matter of hours, because of this cooperative effort between our volunteers and the Coast Guard," said POW mooring director Ken Mullings. "Placing mooring blocks at a few of our more distant historic dive sites has been almost an impossibility for our volunteers. Even our larger charter boats owners couldn't safely handle concrete blocks measuring 2.5'X2.5'X5'." The new moorings sites incorporate large concrete blocks weighing 4500lbs providing the necessary weight to hold 3-4 dive boats tied to the mooring line at any one time. "Our lines are usually thick polypropylene industrial strength rope with spliced in rope thimbles at each end and secured to the mooring block with shackles and galvanized chain," explained Mullings. These mooring sites will allow dive charter boats to securely tie up at wrecks that are a long distance from the Port of Kingston. The Kingston area is fast become a major freshwater dive mecca in North America. Good visibility, preserved wrecks, well maintained dive charter boats and a dive industry that for the most part works together are some of the key reasons that scuba divers from Ontario, Quebec and New York State are spending the weekends and holidays in this city. Mullings, a well known Kingston area diver, has been actively involved with the POW for 16 years. As the volunteer director of this registered charity's mooring project he and a small group of like minded divers have been working to make sure that this new found interest in the shipwrecks of Lake Ontario does not end up damaging the very things people have come to see. The sites that now have mooring blocks in Eastern Lake Ontario near the city of Kingston are: Olive Branch, schooner sank 1880 RH Rae, barque, sank 1858 Wm. Jamieson, schooner, sank 1923 Unidentified wooden steamer nicknamed Glendora scuttled near Amherst Island.   Diver Shorts Marian Peirce, the former chairperson of the volunteer driven annual Underwater Canada dive show has left the big city and hopes that Ontario divers will join her. Peirce, a longtime Hamilton area resident has sold her home and opened a dive resort near Peterborough, Ontario. "Had enough of the city?" asks Marian Peirce. "Then this great get-away is for you." Marrick's Landing is a small inn on Lovesick Lake on the Trent Severn Waterway in Central Ontario. The resort has a number of one, two and three bedroom cottages and is geared to both individual divers and dive clubs. Peirce has already identified and marked dive spots in both Lovesick Lake and nearby Stony Lake. The resort can be reached at 800-342-1495 or info@marrickslanding.com   Famous Canadians Last month DIVER Magazine learned that Lise Kinahan has been inducted into the Women's Diving Hall of Fame in New York. The former director of NAUI Canada has been a driving force within Canada's scuba industry for two decades. This month the magazine learned that the Cayman Islands has set up its own Scuba Hall of Fame. One of the names on that list is that of the late Jack McKenny. Canada's McKenny was a west coast film maker, writer and photographer (his pictures have appeared in Diver Magazine).   Lights Action Camera Speaking of famous Canadian cameramen whose work has appeared in Diver Magazine, Toronto's Jim Kozmik found himself in a swimming pool with Rocky earlier this summer. Sylvester Stallone, the star of the Rocky movie series was in Ontario filming an as yet unnamed feature film about the race car industry. One of the scenes in the movie took place in a swimming pool and an underwater filmmaker was needed. Kozmik was called in to film Stallone and friends splashing about in the pool. Although the scene will probably last only seconds when the movie is released, Jim Kozmik reports that the filming took all day!