On the afternoon of Thursday 5th August Scott Sharpe was killed in a tree felling accident whilst working near Launceston.

Scott was one of the great arborists and tree workers of Australia; a past Victorian tree climbing competition winner and leading contract climber.  Tree workers from all over Australia will remember him for his good humour, his wealth of expertise and the enthusiasm with which he shared it.  His technical climbing and equipment knowledge were world-class, in recognition of which he had recently accepted a seat on the technical advisory committee of the international tree climbing competition.  His loss is a severe blow for our entire industry.

Scott had recently moved back to Tasmania with his family to start a business.  We send our deepest sympathies and condolences to his wife and children.

Some of Scott’s colleagues and friends will be meeting to remember him at 3pm on Tuesday 10^th August, at the Notting Hill Hotel on Ferntree Gully Rd., across from Cannings.  Further details will be posted presently.

The full results from the recent International Tree Climbing Competition have now been posted, and are available here.

The VTIO would also like to invite members and interested parties to a meeting of the VTIO committee, to discuss the draft Climbing Guidelines. The meeting will start at 6:00pm on Tuesday 10th August, and will be held in the Arboriculture classroom of NMIT.  Please contact one of the committee if you wish to attend and require further details.

The guidelines have now been available for download from the site for approximately six months, and have previously been mailed out to all members.  We are grateful for all of the feedback and comment that has been received, and the points raised will be discussed at the meeting, as we aim to get the document out of the draft stage.  After the meeting, a revised and updated version will be sent out to all members for your further comment.

The first ITCC results have come in, and congratulations are due to Australia’s Kiah Martin, who finished 3rd overall!  We are still waiting for the official results to come in, so we don’t yet know where Grant Cody placed, but the winners of each event are given below.

*New world record of 13.26 seconds.

Good luck to Kiah Martin and Grant Cody, who are representing Australia in today’s International Tree Climbing Competition.  Word from the States is that the preliminaries on Saturday were rained off, forcing the whole competition into a one-day format on the Sunday.  Results will be posted here as soon as they are available.

In better news, the first revisions of the popular handouts from the recent workshop are now up online.

The PDF on Single Rope Technique now features the RAD system (pictured to the right).

Introduction to Redirects has been updated to include Tom Oldmeadow’s In-Line Retrievable Redirect (see below.)

Perhaps the biggest revision has been to Working the Angles, which has been updated with a new appendix showing graphs of the various relationships described in the text: much easier to work with on a job site than a complicated equation!

The VTIO would also like to announce that the next workshop in this series will be on Visual Tree Assessment. Date and details are still to be finalised, but keep watching this space!