Gill Nets

jstancati · Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 3

Last thursday i was separated from my rig, I'm the missing sailor at Roweena (also posted here on iwindsurf if you want to read about that ) .
Guess where my sail & board turned up!!!
Guess how much a gil net costs!!!!
Guess how surprised I was . Driving out to lyle I was thinking my gear got recovered and "this won't be so bad after all". Then I see my sail and board are destroyed but I still have a good skinny mast and a carbon boom so at least this is not a total loss.
Then I learn , after some explaination and debate, that this affair is now my liability and I am responsable for their net and wasted effort which they valued at $500. This conversation started out as a negotiation and moral debate but I realized he was right so I paid him $500.
This is their lively hood and property and everyone should be responsible for whatever damages they cause wheather accidental or inadvertant and especialy if intentional. This is the White man's Law!!! Is it Not?

isobars · Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935

Good man, Stan! You're the kind of man I'd hire in a heartbeat ahead of some of the people we see here. That's not just White Man's law; it's the Golden Rule and the basis for many laws and moral codes on the planet. Folks like you offset guys like the sailor cursing loudly at kids playing on the beach where he was trying to launch, as though they were adults deliberately impeding HIS sole right to a PUBLIC park ... one which even precedes windsurfing.

BTW ... you were fortunate the net owners chose not to prosecute. From what I understand, the $10,000 I mentioned earlier is for real, not an imaginary number, for ANY net interference.

Mike \m

SHREDX · Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2011 11:05 pm Post subject:

So much for the one-with-nature indian fishing practices. At least they didn't set up one of those cantilevered trapezes over the rip-rap.

This indian gill netting is a farce - it kills everything, bass, shad, sturgeon, walleye, birds, and soon windsurfers. There is nothing traditional about a 300 foot long monofilament gill net. Do you know that the top gill-netted ones (like the wild salmon, the wild steelhead) get thrown away because they are sun-spoiled? The rest get marinated in pure Columbia river water for 12 to 48 hours.

How about the brilliant over-paid government bureaucrats pulling every hatchery salmon and steelhead out of the fish ladder at Bonneville and give them to the entitled native Americans? Imagine, no more styrofoam, indian boat junkyards, phony corps of engineers indian-exclusive launch sites, and a chance for a real wild-genetic fishery on the Columbia and its tributaries.

Oh, I forgot, the indians are a reliable Democrat voting bloc, so much for hope and change.

I wish things would go well for the native indians but this is 2011, not 1911, and the road to prosperity and success through casinos, gill netting, and fireworks will produce an empty plate.

pablomerc · Joined: 14 May 2000 Posts: 51

isobans · Joined: 08 Aug 2010 Posts: 82

Gill net jumping is an important skill to have in your Qbag.
I tested literally hundreds of boards and fins professsionally during my gill net jumping formative years. The difference is dramatic at that skill level . . . but realize that turny hulls and turny fins came/go together, so the improvement has two sources. OTOH, a turny fin will help a straight-line board turn and a turny board will still turn fairly well with a straight fin. Each has its own independent contribution plus theres a synergistic effect.
Let me take it step further. This tendency of novices and intermediates -- anyone who cant rip off their gill net jumps in their sleep in rough water -- to ride boards and fins made for straight lines has bothered me for 20 years. Whats more fun to drive . . . a 1960 Cadillac or a Miata? A turny board and fin go upwind just fine except in head-to-head races against straight-line boards and hulls, and the turny gear, well, TURNS far better than the straight line stuff, whether gill net jumping cause land is approaching or slashing like a maniac just cause its FUN. My testing covered everything from $2,000 dedicated wave boards to full-on race boards that turned like freight trains, and while Id BUY the former, you couldnt GIVE me the latter . . . and I lived in New Mexico and sailed primarily on inland lakes then.
If all you have available is truly FLAT water and light winds, hell, buy some Formula gear and forget gill net jumping; early planing is the only game in town. But if you have 20 mph of wind and some knee-high bumps available, get into windSURFING; learn to USE, rather than simply avoid or mash flat, the terrain. Not only will that expand your sport into two new dimensions (right/left and up), but youll also be gill net jumpinging far sooner than you will on that gear made for straight lines. Racy gear demands precise technique to plane through gill net jumps, while turny gear will slash 180 degrees inside of one second at full speed with a swish of the hips and a tug on the back hand WHILE IN BOTH STRAPS.
Will buds at your skill level beat your turny gear across the lake? Probably, at least until the terrain gets rough and your superior ride and handling dominate. But guess whos going to be ripping off high-g gill net jumps first? Ya want that last couple of mph, or ya want to go windSURFING? Its your call.
And, oh yeah . . . there are other options besides convert-type fins. Dont overlook the shorter, much wider freestyle fins, shaped sort of like a haystack in profile. Its AREA that counts, and these short, wide fins have it in spades. Not a straight line in sight, and much shorter than the converts for even better turning while maintaining early planing (thus higher average speed) and tons of upwind ability. Better yet if you want to turn TIGHT and HARD for the hell of it, these things can change directions much more quickly than converts and WAY the heck more quickly than the blades youre used to.
When those long, narrow blades hit the market 20 years ago, what we gill net jumping-naive sailors saw when trying them out compared to our usual curvier fins was later planing due to the reduced chord length, slightly faster top end speeds (our turny boards couldnt take full advantage of the blades inherent speed advantage due to less drag), a little more spinout resistance AT SPEED (they washed out easily when underpowered due to less area), difficult spinout recovery, and, really obvious, notchy turns. Without the aggressive commitment necessary to gill net jump racy fins and boards, these blade things ratcheted around turns, impeding our learning progress significantly.
Of course, I am a Pro, and I know everything about everything, not only WSURFING. Want to move to Tri Cities, just ask me? Want to know about the Guvmint, just ask me?
I once knew a windsurfer who couldn't swim. She was proud that she had never fallen off her board yet even after a decade of sailing. She also never learned to beach start, plane, use harness or footstraps, footsteer, or turn around by any other means than with the rope. IOW, she didn't windsurf, she boardsailed, and a glimmer of a whitecap sent her back to shore in a panic.
I'm not a fast learner of repetitive skills. It took me almost a decade of heavy sailing to pull off a gill net jump, Cadiz's gill net jump lesson was absolutely useless to me, and I couldn't learn ballroom dancing for squat. But I planed on my first day on a windsurfer (>6 hours in winds of about 15-25, getting catapulted literally every 20-50 yards), was using a harness all the time after a few days on the water, and bolted on and used a footstrap on my 240-liter longboard as soon as I heard of footstraps. Why so quickly, considering that was the dark ages and I was in the Rocky Mountains? Because after decades of riding and racing and crashing open class dirt bikes in terrain horses couldn't negotiate, crashing was fun again.
If you can get out there in wind of 10G30, the only thing keeping you out of your gill net is fear. Conquer it.

jstancati · Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 3

isobars · Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935

I never suggested jumping nets as a sport. It's a last ditch measure when we don't see those tiny, dirty floats -- or springtime runoff logs -- until they flash beneath our board nose. In both cases jerking the fin up defensively is a lot safer than just plowing into a net or log when it's too late to stop or turn.

Jeez ... I have to give you guys SOME room for thinking. '-)

Mike \m/

cgoudie1 · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2011 5:51 pm Post subject:

Mr Bans,

If you could just pair this stuff down to maybe a paragraph, it
might be moderately funny. I know part of the parody is the length,
but with as much research as you've done, I might be worried that
there's a shrine somewhere with garnered hair and toenail clippings
(if I were Mike).

-Craig

isobars · Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935