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The following is the text of a press release issued March  30, 2009 by the U.S. Coast Guard:

(SEATTLE) — Coast Guard Sector Portland, Ore., is investigating a bridge allision involving the Tidewater Tug Defiance and the Hood River Bridge on the Columbia River in Ore., Saturday. At 3:20 a.m. the Tug Defiance was pushing three barges ahead when one of the barges allided with the north pylon of the Hood River Bridge.

Immediately following the incident, the Tug Defiance and barges quickly moored upriver at the SDS Lumber facility in Bingen, Ore., to assess the damage.

Crewmembers from Sector Portland worked with Tidewater in determining that the barge had sustained minor damage and is safe for continued cargo operations.

The Port of Hood River inspected the bridge and found no damage. There is no current threat to the environment and the bridge remains open to all traffic.

==

The things you learn: allision: to strike or dash against. Maybe an allision is a collision only not as bad.

Toward the end of July, 2006 a fierce wind blew through Hood River that left almost all of the sailors in the corridor frustrated and mildly confused. It wasn’t that the wind blew hard, it was that it had a wicked southerly angle, a component that leaves all but the truly stubborn on the beach. On occasion, though, the stubborn are rewarded. The trick to surviving the southerly (other than leaving the corridor completely) is to put in at the Event Site, smile to the nice kiteboarders and turn right and sail in their area. In fact, the payoff is to be so stubborn that you sail through the whole kite community and stay just down river of the Marina. NOBODY sails there except, on this one day, me and some Canadian hockey player with long blond hair. Maybe it was a dream. It felt like it after this day.

In a big southerly, the waves pile up against the Washington wall and bounce off, forming wedges that make the hassle worthwhile. Only the hockey player and I were taking advantage. Actually, she was there by accident, having put in at the Marina and turned left. I found out about her heritage and passions as we sat on the tip of the sand bar and watched a barge driver take a couple of shots at the Hood River bridge. It’s a narrow part of the river, so when a barge comes through, it’s best just to take a breather and watch.

The wind got puffier and stronger and backed further south. I’d say the gusts had to be in the upper thirties. I was getting pushed around pretty hard on my 4.2. I couldn’t imagine how a barge, with that much surface area facing perpendicular to the odd wind direction would manage to stuff his load through that little bridge opening. And, he didn’t, on the first try. That big yellow smiley (BYS) face turned grim with determination as the tug driver floored it. I guess he thought he could get through with a burst of speed. But the Wind said, “No way, bud,” and dealt out a monster puff.

Reverse. I didn’t know those things could stop that quickly. The new problem was that now that he had stopped, the wind was about to shove him onto the Washington shore. Black smoke poured out of the tug’s stacks as he jammed it into full reverse, with his stern toward me and the hockey player. Once he got some way on he turned down river. The effect on his barge was sort of like crack-the-whip; he sort of flung it so that it lined up again with the river. He continued backing up clear to the White Salmon bridge, making an even bigger mess for all the sailors.

The hockey player and I resumed sailing. Soon a little tug (LT) came from the lumber yard in Bingen and joined BYS. Two tugs are better than one. I thought it would take them awhile to hook LT up to the front of BYS but they didn’t bother. The plan was to have LT push the nose of BYS enough into the wind as they approached the bridge. So, the hockey player and I took another seat on the sand bar and watched. There was a lot more black smoke and churning water but they made it. No dings. Another blond came paddling up to us in a kayak. He said a few words to the hockey player and they took off together and made their way back to the Marina.

It was a great week to be a windsurfer/kiteboarder in the Gorge! After a chilly spring and spotty wind, things cranked up in a big way this past week, with the full range of conditions offered up.

After my latest start to the season in memory, I was committed to make up for lost time, and sailed four of the last seven days, loving (almost) every minute of it. Monday was a perfect 4.2 after-work session at the White Salmon Bridge, with a clean swell and lots of open space.

Thursday I wedged a brief-but-memorable session in between work and an evening meeting. I was fully lit up on a 3.4, with the biggest swell I can remember at the Hatchery. It was beyond big, with sailors disappearing behind clean, smooth, almost mast-high river swells!

Friday was another really fun after-work employee sailing session at the Event Site on 5 and 6 meter sails and freeride boards. It’s sometimes easy to lose sight of how much fun it is to go rip around with friends in 15-20 mph breezes. Social sailing. Pretty darn fun.

I ended the week with a rugged, really windy 3.4 session at Doug’s yesterday afternoon. It was the definition of rough water! I also squeezed in a few tennis matches and a bunch of work. This place is exhausting!

See you out there,
Steve

Yikes, that’s a lot of options! How does one even begin to go about finding the right board? At Big Winds we love chatting with our customers, either in our store or on the phone or via email, and getting a really good feel for what sort of gear they really need. In addition to our own personal experience with the gear, our expert staff make their recommendations based on all sorts of variables like rider height and weight, skill level, favorite conditions and preferred riding style.

To help you with your purchasing decision, we’ve put together a handy series of comparison charts that will let you quickly browse and sort through products that share similar traits. Whether you’re looking for a 90 liter board, a 5.2 meter sail or a 400 cm mast, these new tools will make it far easier for you to zero in on your options.

Check it out! On our usual category page, we now have a sidebar that offers some common product comparisons:

If you click on an option it takes you to a list of all the products that match those criteria. In this case, we see all windsurf boards between 90 and 100 liters, sorted by volume:

Here’s the gravy, though. If you click on any of the column headings, it will instantly resort the list based on the items in that column. If you want to reverse the order that a column is sorted by, simply click on the column heading again. In this case, we’ve resorted the list based on price, descending:

Cool, eh? Our comparison tool is currently available on the following products:

• Windsurf Boards by Volume
• Windsurf Sails by Size
• Masts by Length and by Carbon Content
• Kites by Size
• Kiteboards by Length
• Stand Up Boards by Length

We hope you like it!

We here at Big Winds recently launched a new section of our website dedicated to stand up paddling. There’s certainly a ton of cross-pollination between stand up paddling and windsurfing, and a number of the boards we carry have mast tracks so you can use them for either sport. That said, stand up has its own special finesse, a certain je ne sais qoi, and continuing to lump it in with windsurfing just doesn’t do it justice.

What’s more, we’re getting pretty crazy into stand up ourselves! Daryl picked up two Amundson stand up boards for her sons, David refuses to be separated from his Werner paddle, and Steve has both a Pacifico Wave and a Naish Stand Up board permanently mounted on his truck, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

This summer is going to the Year of the Paddlers here in the Gorge, and we’re really excited to have a way to get out on the water on those rare no-wind days. Even in light winds, we have a number of shop riders who would rather go paddle some chop than go out on a huge sail. We’re totally stoked on this sport, and we hope we can share our passion and excitement with you!

Okay, we’ve talked about this on our parent site, but perhaps it also bears mentioning here… we’ve cooked up a new virtual tour of our retail shop, so ya’ll across the world can check us out all “brick and mortar” style. Yup. Rather than some big and heartless e-retailer, Big Winds is actually a locally owned and operated shop located in Hood River, the high-wind sailing (and kiting!) mecca of the contiguous United States.

We hope to make this a casual space where we can talk about all the cool stuff that we’re doing, without going through all the professional mumbo-jumbo that’s involved with publishing to our business website.

Sounds good, eh? Well, yeah. Talk is cheap, however, and the world is littered with abandoned weblogs. We’ll try our best to avoid going down that road.