Kelowna Rowing Club looking for new home
Kelowna rowers are looking for a safe haven to pull into on the west side of Okanagan Lake.
Members of the Kelowna Rowing Club hope West Kelowna city council will tomorrow instruct staff to try find space in a municipally-owned waterfront park for the 105-year-old organization.
Despite its name, for the past decade the club has actually been based in West Kelowna, operating out of the Green Bay Bible Camp. The camp is no longer available to the club, however, and the group needs to find a new home.
“Our goal is to remain on the west side of Lake Okanagan,” club president Brian Rasmussen writes in a letter to West Kelowna council.
The club has about 40 active members, who each year teach a roughly equal number of people how to row.
For a new location, club members say, they need to use a waterfront area with a 60 foot wide beach, preferably a sandy one, and 450 square feet of space to store rowing shells and equipment.
Club members hope to get a new base in time for the start of this year’s rowing season, in April.
A similar request by the rowing club for use of municipally-owned waterfront was turned aside by West Kelowna in 2015, but the organization hopes for a more favourable response now.
The club is “seeking support from the City of West Kelowna to provide waterfront access that would allow our club to maintain its standing as one of the oldest continuous athletic clubs in the Okanagan,” Rasmussen writes in his letter to council.
In years past, the Kelowna Rowing Club was based at the old Regatta grandstand, the Kelowna Yacht Club, and the Central Okanagan Sailing Associaiton clubhouse on Hobson Road in Kelowna.