Proof there is more to the city than the city

So yesterday we took the streetcar about 20 minutes east to The Beaches area of the city. This is somewhere I'd never been before, but Zoe has been a couple of times with Rob. It's a bit different to the hustle and bustle of downtown, instead it is a different kind of hustle and bustle of people and canines.

The first stop was the very end of the streetcar route. The R. C. Harris Water Filtration Plant. This is an internationally renowned piece of industrial architecture. At the minute it is undergoing a lot of restoration so it's not easy to get photos of all of it, but it is still functional and supplies 45% of all the fresh water to the Toronto region.
Right beside the plant is the Lake Ontario coastline that runs to the Scarborough bluffs, a section of headland with what passes for cliffs in this area.
To the west are the beaches that run back towards downtown.
And I'll leave you with a picture of a beagle that kept trying to get up on the rocks to where I was sitting.

Opti Olympics

Well since I've missed a large period, here are two on one day.

A couple of weekends ago the sailing club that Zoe is part of had a "fun" weekend event called the Opti Olympics. An Opti, apparently, is a bathtub with a sail. It may be more technical than that, but it's what it looks like to me.
Anyway they had this event which was to consist of a series of races in these boats, in between the thunderstorns, four boats at a time. The person who is the club photographer was away on vacation so they asked me to do the photography for the event. I agreed, and as a result ended up going out on a speedboat owned by a member of the club to photo the event.
Things started well, the competitors took their time getting out of the quay area and into the open water, where they all made their way to the buoy that was being used as a marker for the races. Some got there quicker than others, but everyone made it eventually. At that point however things changed dramatically. The wind started gusting and things started to go wrong. Remember how I said bathtubs with sails? Well bathtubs usually have the water on the inside, and the lake had the same thought.
One by one all the competitors took on water and sunk in one fashion or another. We got a couple of more speedboats out from the club to rescue the competitors and at a point I had to stop taking pictures and start pulling people out of the water and trailing semi-sunk boats.

People along the waterfront stopped to take pictures, and one of the large touring boats passed us, and then swung round again so all the tourists could have a better look. Eventually even the police sent out a boat to rescue one of our sailors and their boat.
See, this is what happens to boats, and something always seems to happen when I'm out on one.

Weather

Okay, so I know it's been a little while since my last posting, but I just don't always get around to it. Anyway just to placate the masses, here are some photos that have been taken recently of the weather around Toronto.

This first one was taken by Zoe while I was at work one day. A very strange storm system came over the lake. It was very localised and kept sending down tendrils of cloud from the main storm front. Almost like some strange creature living in the cloud reaching down for food constantly.

This was was just a simple shot of a storm front coming into the city. We've had loads of storms of late to contend with, seems there's been a thunder storm every other day for the last month and a half. Apparently July was the wettest July on record for Toronto. That seems right, we've been here less than a year and already had the most snow in 60 years and the most rain ever.

And finally, this is just a shot of the sunset last night. It was raining and with heavy thunderclouds most of the day, but it just happened to have a clear spot just as the sun was going down which made for some impressive pictures.