Southern California Surf Community Develops Sophisticated Relationship With Hope As Primary Recreational Activity
HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report, with appropriate atmosphere from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, that the El Nino weather pattern that forecasters described in September as “poised to deliver a historically memorable Southern California swell season” has, through its seventh month of operation, delivered four and a half days of genuinely good surf and 208 days of conditions that surf forecasting services have described, with the specific professional optimism of people who have invested their careers in the belief that there will eventually be waves, as “clean with some form,” “showing signs of life,” and “a great time to practice your pop-up,” which is the forecasting industry’s vocabulary for conditions so flat that a beginner’s lesson is the optimal use of the day.
The extended forecast at Surfline has shown a “significant swell event” somewhere between 8 and 14 days out since November 14. The event has migrated forward in time at approximately the same rate that actual time advances — maintaining a consistent position in the near future with the placidity of something that is not actually approaching, like a horizon that remains equidistant regardless of how long you drive toward it. Meteorologists interviewed for this article confirmed that the El Nino pattern does statistically elevate swell activity in Southern California, that the statistics describe averages across multiple El Nino years, and that the specific El Nino currently in operation appears to be delivering its elevated swell activity to the north and south of Southern California with an efficiency that suggests either atmospheric bad luck or an atmospheric indifference to the surfing plans of people in Orange County.
The Community’s Psychological Adaptation: Remarkable And Specific
The Southern California surf community has developed, across seven months of flat conditions, a set of coping practices that behavioral researchers would recognize as the characteristic adaptations of a population managing prolonged deprivation of a primary pleasure: increased attention to equipment maintenance, elevated consumption of surf media from better-waved locations, the development of strong opinions about surfing that are not refreshed by recent personal experience, and a relationship with the Surfline extended forecast that combines the compulsive checking of something genuinely important with the epistemological skepticism of someone who has been disappointed by the forecast seventeen times in a row.
The boards are in excellent condition. The wetsuits are rinsed and hung. The parking lot at Huntington has a different population in the early morning than it did before the flat spell: instead of surfers checking the waves before paddling out, there are surfers checking the waves before returning to their cars, evaluating whether today is the day the forecast was right, concluding that it is not, and then checking the extended forecast on their phones to confirm that Tuesday is still showing something significant, which it is, as it has been since March.
The Actual Forecast
South swells begin arriving in June. The south swell season is described as potentially significant. Forecasters are cautiously optimistic. The surf community is cautiously optimistic about the forecasters’ caution. For surf conditions at Surfline.
About Surfing LA
Surfing.LA covers Southern California surf culture, wave conditions, industry news, and the specific comedic texture of a region that has built an entire cultural identity around riding waves in a place where the waves are good approximately 30 percent of the time. The satirical coverage at surfingla.com draws from the full history of Southern California surf culture, from the Malibu colony of the 1950s through the shortboard revolution of the 1970s through the WSL era of the 2010s and into the wave-pool future that professional surfing is apparently building toward whether the culture wants it or not. Southern California produces more surf culture than it produces actual surf, which is the foundational irony that this publication explores. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are affiliated publications that bring a transatlantic perspective to California surf news, which sounds strange but works because great satire has no geographic limitations and neither does the specific absurdity of professional surfing governance.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/