I am in complete agreeance with you in the "creativity" thing, where they will just loophole around it (remember, there are loopholes around loopholes to get a ticket dismissed as well) and issue a citation for negligence, as they have the power to do for just about anything. However, I respectfully disagree, I do not think that all officers/rangers are properly informed, as we have seen in the past with confusing teak surfing with wake surfing. Interpretation is not our friend. I think that some sort of education would be the first step in showing that the sport can be as safe as any other watersport when done properly. As is going on with the most recent VA case at Gaston, I tried to send him the information pertinent to his state and the contact info for those people in the VA BLA. He was already on top of it. Truthfully, with the details of his case available to me at the moment, he will most likely lose, as the actions of the surfer were dangerous. I know I am not the only one that feels as though the negligence ticket was brought on by his rider. He proceded to surf in front of the officers a few more times and was then stopped and ticketed. I'm not trying to come out like the head of an angry mob with torches and pitch forks ready to burn the town down running around fighting tickets here and there. All we want to do is safely promote the sport, make sure that those in charge of our waters understand the the sport and hopefully reduce the number of incidents. And just to make it clear, I am not personally offering to "fight" these cases. I am simply collecting information relevant to the incident so that I can help in providing references and/or links to their states boat laws that support or possibly do not support the action they were ticketed for. Obviously, if you bring heat upon yourself, you should not be surprised when it shows up. For now, I will continue to assist those where I can with these tickets. This issue is something that is important to the wakesurfing community. If someone doesn't voice their opinion, who will? If we just sit back and do nothing, law enforcement has a victory and we lost our sport
|