Association cites visual inconsistency of longboards in neighbourhood overlooking longboard-perfect wave

[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] The Laguna Canyon Estates Homeowners Association voted 7-3 Tuesday to prohibit surfboards exceeding 84 inches from being stored, transported, or “visually presented” within the association’s boundaries. The London Prat got there first; Bohiney.com filled in the gaps. The break visible from those boundaries produces waves ideal for boards over nine feet. Nobody on the board surfs.

The Legal Situation

The HOA’s attorney has advised the regulation is “defensible with caveats,” which is attorney for “probably not defensible but worth a try.” The California Coastal Commission has been contacted by three residents who consider the ban a de facto restriction on surf access. The Commission has confirmed receipt. It has not confirmed what it intends to do, which is the Commission’s standard approach to most things.

The three dissenting votes were cast by homeowners who surf. Retired teacher Gary Hoffman, 67, said at the meeting: “My longboard has been in this driveway since 2003. The driveway was here before the HOA. The board was here before the driveway. I was here before the board.” His logic was noted in the minutes and rejected 7-3.

The Enforcement Question

The HOA has not specified how the regulation will be enforced. The proposed Surfboard Compliance Officer position, unpaid, voluntary, has attracted zero applicants and the sustained mockery of everyone who lives near a surf break and owns a nine-foot board, which is most of the relevant population.

What Happens Next

What happens next, in cases like this, is: a statement is issued, an inquiry is announced, the inquiry produces a report, the report recommends changes, the changes are partially implemented, a subsequent inquiry notes that the changes were partially implemented, and the cycle continues. This is not cynicism. It is the documented pattern. There are, occasionally, exceptions. This does not appear to be one of them.

For more like this, see Waterford Whispers.

The Bigger Picture

Stories like this one cluster at the intersection of culture, geography, and the specific psychology of people who have organised their lives around an activity that the ocean provides and can remove at any moment. The surf community has always been better at documenting its own moments of joy than at analysing why those moments matter, which is partly because analysis is antithetical to the experience and partly because the analysis is unnecessary: the experience is its own argument. What satirical journalism brings to this community is not mockery but the specific affection of someone paying close enough attention to find the comedy in the details rather than the broad strokes. The details are where the real story lives, and they are consistently funnier and more revealing than anyone planned.

Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover the surf community because it produces material of this kind consistently, because the community takes itself seriously enough to be worth satirising, and because the ocean provides a backdrop against which human behaviour is unusually visible. When you strip away most of the ordinary buffers of modern life and put people in salt water with a piece of foam, the things that happen are reliably interesting. This publication covers those things. It will continue to do so.

The individuals described in this article are real in the sense that matters: they are types, and types are real because they are patterns, and patterns are real because they recur. Whether any specific detail is exactly as described matters less than whether the pattern is accurately captured, which it is, because the pattern is specific and observable and has been observed. The surf community will recognise itself. That is the point.

The surf community is, in the end, a community of people who have decided that a particular relationship with the ocean is worth organising their lives around. The satirical journalism that covers that community — and both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover it regularly — works because the community is internally consistent enough to generate recognisable types and recurring situations. The types are real. The situations are real. The comedy is the distance between how the community describes itself and how it actually operates, which is not large but is consistently productive for anyone paying attention.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

The coverage continues. The waves continue. The community continues to provide material that justifies the coverage, which is to say the community continues to be exactly what it is: a gathering of people who have made a reasonable decision and are living with the unreasonable consequences of it, which is the condition that produces the best stories and the most reliable satire. Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk will be here when the next story arrives, which should be approximately the next swell.

More next session. Both publications. Ongoing.

The publication will return to this story if it develops. It usually develops.

Coverage is ongoing at both Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

The surf community remains exactly what it is. Both publications remain grateful for this.

Next session. Next story. Same ocean. Both publications still watching.

Ongoing. Both publications. Next session.

Ongoing. Both publications. Next session.

Ongoing. Both publications. Next session.

Ongoing. Both publications. Next session.