Hood River Port closes safe access to Kiters this weekend!!!

[BigR]

I found some unexploded ordinance today at the sandbar....

[Dickfircrick]

So.......? Hold on to it and toss it onto your next Tire fire!

[laura]

funny after the picture you choose, you would even throw stones at people for acting like children, pdx, is probable why it is not important to you to keep our access open here, what this boils down to is safety, fairness, and caring about our access in this community WE live in.

[bfar]

Forrest; the data comes from DBA members ( and our family business that sees a huge increase in sales every year that the Thomas show comes; as well as our retail and restaurant neighbors). The day after the train leaves all our businesses slow significantly.
When the sand bar is huge and there are a ton of kites out over a nice weekend our customer traffic flow does not increase as you would think it would. Same info comes from restaurant owners.

Oh and to whoever that was regarding #'s of kites vs. sails; on the 5th I spent 2 hours at the waterfront park with my kids and at the late afternoon peak I counted from Wells Island to the bridge 75 kites on the water and 92 windsurfers (not including kites on the bar or sails on the grass, resting sails visibly outnumbered resting kites).

Monkey boy you're right on.

[Kodiak]

Bfar,
Contrary to what you think , your "feelings" are not data. Data would be actual amounts of money brought in by kiteboarders vs. the amount of money brought in by people coming to see Thomas on a yearly basis. Now I would imagine that for any event you are going to see a surge of sales and then a slowdown of sales from when people leave. So saying that when Thomas comes to town you see business pick up is pretty obvious, but making the leap to the fact that your pickup in business from when Thomas comes to town vs. what you sell to kiters for the year is a pretty freaking huge leap. It would also make a big difference what type of business you have I would guess. Maybe you sell children's books, all of this is pretty irrelevant taken out of context.

As far as the number of kiters vs. windsurfers on the water. On really windy sunny days, it does feel about even. For most of the other days, it certainly feels like there are more kiters than windsurfers out there. Of course as I mentioned, my feelings are not actual data eitehr. But if we were to base the numbers on your count of kiters vs. windssurfers, and call it about a 50/50 mix. Wouldn't you find it odd that windsurfers have two very nice launches they can use on the 4th and kiters have 0?

Finally, counting the number of sails sitting on the beach vs. kites sitting on the beach doesn't help. As a windsurfer I would typically rig up 3 sails on any given day and switch quite often based upon the conditions.

[pkh]

I don't know of anyone buying houses in the area because of Thomas the Train

[Matt E.]

Thanks for the Comment Phill i was just thinking the same thing.

[BigR]

[pkh]

BigR - I meant that kiters are buying houses in the area, not Thomas the Train fans. Between my taxes, utility fees, bridge toll payments, kite shops, food, drink, etc... $$$$$. Lots of people can say the same.

Its retarded to think that kiting doesn't contribute tons of cash into the area. Thomas the Train I am sure is huge, but its one weekend a year.

PDXMB - The main point is we lost 2.5 days of spit access on a pretty huge 3-day weekend. We even got kicked off when we used our jetskis to access the small sandbar on July 4th because we were violating some 600 foot buffer that was a "federal law." Seriously the fireworks folks called the cops on us without even talking to us. Lame.

Its cool Sherry has already offered to open the discussion on the issue, so that's great. Progress is already being made.

Anyway stoked on the weekend, it was fun!

[JW]

ALL I CAN SAY IS THE COAST . whine and bitch thats what kiters are getting known for great sport to be apart of

[Kodiak]

I think there is a difference between whining and bitching and just fighting for some equality. I am sure the same thing was said about windsurfers fighting for access back in the day as well.

[Chooch]

[pkh]

[JW]

maybe we need a bitch and moan section , I though nwkite was that ? 90% of the topics are bitching and moaning on this site . look at the people that are bitching . they are the ones that post the most . they must think buy bitching it makes you a better kiter this so lame .

[forrest]

It's not like any of this is being handed to you. You come and visit this site, it doesn't come and visit you. If you don't like it, don't read it.

WERD on the statements above about surfers, snowboarders, and windsurfers.

[forrest]

Dude, the irony is the Port's mission statement:

[Nak]