Entry for the 2011 Victorian Tree Climbing Championship is now closed. The event will be run on Saturday 12 November at the Commonwealth Reserve in Williamstown, to the west of Melbourne. The aim is to run the whole event in a single day, weather permitting, so we’re going to be on a tight schedule!
The event will be run in the same format as last year, with competitors split into four grades: Student, Men’s Open, Women’s and Men’s Masters grade. Entries for the Masters grade will again be capped at 25, with places awarded on previous competition ranking then by precedence, so get your entries in early.
On the day before the competition, the VTIO will be offering a full-day tree climbing workshop, focusing on honing the skills and techniques used at the climbing competition, but also on tying those skills in to the practice of tree climbing in your day-to-day work. Presenting the workshop will be some of the top climbers in the world: Scott Forrest (ITCC champion), Joe Harris (ITCC runner-up) and Grant Cody (3 time Australian champion). Please see the post below, or click here to download a PDF of the flyer.
Entry for both the 2011 VTCC and the preliminary workshop closed at 6:00pm on Wed 2 November.
On Tuesday 28th September the VTIO in partnership with Council Arboriculture Victoria (CAV) will be running a workshop on tree hazard assessment in the beautiful grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne.
Details are still to be finalised, but we hope to be working with several leading speakers to cover a range of topics related to visual tree assesment, identifying structural weak points and discussing targets, as well as offering a guided ‘walk and talk’ around some of the interesting trees in the gardens. Further information will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.
Registration is available using the form given here.
The dates for the Victorian Tree Climbing Competition have also been pencilled in – we hope to run the competition across the weekend of October 23rd/24th, with the venue tentatively confirmed as Warragul. Further details and entry forms will be given here as they become available.
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.
Although we are still waiting for the official ATCC results to be posted, the VTIO congratulates Grant Cody and Kiah Martin for bringing home the national titles… again! They will be representing Australia in the international tree climbing championships in Chicago, so good luck to them both.
The competition in Adelaide was a great success, so congratulations as well to Doug Sharp, Brett Hamlin and the rest of the ISAAC and SASA volunteers for putting on such a great event. Although it might be a (slight) exaggeration to talk about a media frenzy, the event did receive national reporting!
On that subject, those of you who took part in the Victorian competition last November may also be interested to read the Inside Sport article on the event.
It’s great for the competition and the industry to be gaining such positive coverage, so hopefully we can attract more coverage of the next Victorian competition. And what is more, we get to see Kiah and Grant becoming official (D-grade) celebrities!
The 2009 Victorian Tree Climbing Championship will follow the 2009 International Society of Arboriculture Tree Climbing Competition Rules. A copy of these is available here. There are many changes from previous rules sets, and competitors should familiarise themselves with these rules prior to arriving at the competition.
Climbers should also be aware of the most recent guidelines on acceptable equipment. Due to safety concerns, some of the lighter aluminium snaps are no longer acceptable for competition use. The ISA policy on which snaps will be accepted is given here. Please be aware that this ruling will be in force for the 2009 Victorian Tree Climbing Championship.