Four-to-One Council Vote Follows Months of Testimony From Shortboarders Who Described Longboard Presence as Aesthetically Confrontational and Economically Inefficient

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

SAN CLEMENTE, CALIFORNIA — The San Clemente City Council voted four to one Tuesday to establish a Longboard Exclusion Zone covering the entirety of Lower Trestles State Beach during peak surfing hours, citing what Councilmember Trent Holloway described as “a cultural emergency that has been building for at least a decade and frankly longer if you ask anyone who surfs shortboards, which is the majority of serious surfers, and by serious I mean competitive, and by competitive I mean people who are trying to actually do things on the wave rather than just gracefully ride the entire thing at a pleasant cruise while everyone else waits.” The exclusion zone, operating between 7am and 5pm daily from Memorial Day through Labor Day, prohibits any surfboard exceeding eight feet in length and will be enforced by contracted wave monitors on jet skis rented, Holloway confirmed, “at a very reasonable rate” from a company in which he has no financial interest.

Why Longboards Are Now a Municipal Crisis

The council’s decision followed four months of public hearings during which dozens of shortboard surfers provided testimony describing the experience of surfing Lower Trestles alongside longboarders in terms that ranged from “frustrating” to “psychologically destabilising” to, in one memorably dramatic submission from a competitive surfer named Ryan, “an existential affront to everything I believe about flow and momentum and honestly about myself as a person.” Ryan declined to elaborate further but submitted a forty-seven-page written statement that council members agreed covered the topic comprehensively and included seventeen footnotes, four graphs, and a section titled “The Economics of Wave Consumption” that one councilmember described as “genuinely interesting, whatever your position on the boards.”

Councilmember Holloway, who acknowledged during the session that he had last surfed in 2009 and was “more of a paddleboard guy now, which I acknowledge is a different conversation,” said the decision was not anti-longboard in spirit but rather pro-efficiency. “Lower Trestles is a world-class point break,” Holloway said. “It is a high-performance wave. When a longboarder takes off on the outside and rides a wave for forty-five seconds at a gentle, pleasant, extremely time-consuming cruise, they are consuming a shared natural resource that a shortboarder could have used to perform three manoeuvres, generate content, qualify for a regional event, and send footage to his sponsor. That is an economic calculation the city of San Clemente cannot continue to ignore.”

Longboarders Mount a Spirited and Extremely Unhurried Defence

The longboard community responded to the ruling with what observers described as “remarkable calm, which is either admirable or proof of exactly the energy shortboarders find so irritating.” A delegation of six longboarders attended the final council session wearing matching linen shirts and carrying handwritten signs that read STYLE IS NOT A CRIME, CROSS-STEPPING IS NOT A FEDERAL OFFENCE, and, on one sign that stood slightly apart from the group, JOEL TUDOR SHOULD BE ON THE CURRENCY.

Spokesperson for the delegation, a woman named Francesca who has longboarded Trestles since 1999 and described herself as “constitutionally incapable of rushing anything, on the wave or in life,” told the council that longboarding represented “a distinct and historically significant surf tradition that predates shortboarding, predates the city of San Clemente, predates the concept of the city council, and predates, if we are being fully accurate, most of the things this room considers important.” She said the exclusion zone was discriminatory, retrograde, and would not stand. She then paused for a very long time before sitting down, in a way that felt, to everyone in the room, entirely intentional. The single dissenting vote came from Councilmember Patricia Nguyen, who said she surfed a nine-foot single-fin and considered the entire proceedings “deeply embarrassing for everyone involved.”

Lower Trestles in Context: A World Surf League Legacy Site

Lower Trestles has hosted the World Surf League professional tour and is consistently ranked among the finest point breaks in the continental United States, producing fast, powerful, mechanically reliable waves that reward aggressive, progressive surfing and that have been the backdrop for some of the most significant competitive moments in modern surfing history. The break is technically located within San Onofre State Beach, managed by California State Parks, and legal experts consulted by the longboard delegation have raised the question of whether a city council possesses jurisdiction over a state-managed beach, a question Councilmember Holloway described as “a technical matter we are absolutely looking into” and which the delegation’s attorney described as “the entire case, actually.”

The California Coastal Commission, which oversees public access to coastal resources, noted it had not been consulted prior to the vote and would be reviewing the ordinance for consistency with state access law. The Commission’s statement concluded, as Commission statements typically do, by noting that “further review may be warranted,” which lawyers on both sides agreed was legally ambiguous and humanly unsurprising.

The Surfline forecast for Lower Trestles currently shows a solid south swell arriving in early June, which longboarders and shortboarders both confirmed they are looking forward to, the exclusion zone notwithstanding, since enforcement begins June 15 and everyone expects the jet skis to be awaiting service by then anyway.

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Filed with sympathy for all boards. The Daily Mash is also confused about why this required four months of public hearings.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/san-clemente-longboard-free-zone/