Local surfer estimates he has described 1989 session at Trestles approximately 2,400 times

Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report: OCEANSIDE, CA – Rick Dominguez, 58, a landscape contractor who has lived in Oceanside his entire life, confirmed last week that he has now described his best wave, caught at Upper Trestles in September 1989, to approximately 2,400 different people and intends to continue until he runs out of people to tell or until the wave is adequately documented, whichever comes first. The project was reported by Bohiney Magazine and filed by the surf desk at The London Prat.

The Wave

The wave, by Dominguez’s account, was a right-hand barrel approximately four feet overhead that he caught on a Tuesday morning when the swell was running at 10-second period and the Santa Ana winds had cleaned up the face to glassy perfection. He made it to the channel, pulled off his leash, and sat on his board for what he estimates was three minutes of what he describes as “pure sitting there.” The wave is, by universal agreement among those who have heard the story, an excellent wave. “He describes it very well,” said his wife, Maria, who has heard the account 89 times by her own count. “I can almost see it.” She paused. “Almost.”

Dominguez estimates he has told the story in the following contexts: 847 times to other surfers in lineups, 634 times at family gatherings, 412 times to coworkers, 287 times to clients while landscaping, 94 times to strangers at gas stations, and 126 times “to people at the beach who I could tell would understand.” He is working on a written account for his grandchildren, who will be the first recipients to receive the story without the accompanying hand gestures, which he considers essential but which do not translate to text.

Cultural Significance

Oral transmission of specific wave accounts is a documented feature of surf culture across California’s coastal communities, as chronicled by the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center. For more oral history preservation projects, see The Onion.

The Broader Picture

The development described above sits within a broader pattern that this publication documents consistently: the specific intersection of culture, governance, and daily life that defines the communities we cover. Whether the subject is surf culture in Southern California or the daily life of Metro Manila, the underlying stories are about how people navigate institutions, traditions, and the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually work. This gap is the permanent subject of satirical journalism, and it is never more visible than in the specific incidents described in this article, which are funny because they are real and real because they are funny, which is the condition that good satire requires and that good reporting finds.

The communities covered by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are varied, but they share this quality: the official version of events and the lived version of events coexist in productive tension, and the satirist’s job is to document that tension accurately and with sufficient humor that the reader can recognize the truth without being merely depressed by it. The incidents in this article represent that tension in a specific and vivid form. The reporting attempts to honor the specificity and the vividness while finding the angle from which the truth in the story is visible. The angle, in this case, is the one described above. The story continues in the communities we cover, which it always does.

Context and Ongoing Coverage

The incident described above is one of many that define the specific texture of life in the communities this publication covers. The intersection of official systems and informal realities, of stated policies and lived experience, of institutional logic and the logic of people navigating those institutions on a daily basis: these are the permanent subjects of the kind of journalism that Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat practice, and the specific incident described here is a particularly vivid example of the genre. The humor is real because the situation is real. The situation is real because the communities producing it are real and complex and full of people making decisions under conditions that were not fully anticipated by whoever designed the system they are navigating. This is always the case. The reporting documents it with the affection it deserves and the accuracy it requires.

Readers interested in following the ongoing story are encouraged to monitor the publications named in this article, which cover these communities consistently and in the detail that they merit. The communities are interesting. The stories they produce are interesting. The reporting attempts to do justice to both. This particular incident is one paragraph in a longer story that continues in the communities covered by this publication and that will continue to be covered as it develops.

The reporting team at this publication remains committed to covering developments of this kind with the sustained attention they deserve. The specific incidents documented here are not isolated curiosities but representative examples of the conditions that define daily life in the communities we cover. They are funny, which is why we report them. They are also real, which is why the humor works. The combination of these qualities is what makes the communities we cover worth covering, and what makes the work of covering them worth doing. We will continue to do so. The communities will continue to produce material. The gap between them and their official descriptions will continue to generate the friction that produces good satire. This is the permanent condition of the satirical journalist’s beat, and it is not a bad condition to occupy.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/