OB Rag Calls Out San Diego Media on Reports of ‘Thousands’ in Trump Boat Parade

Video grab from “Students for Trump” tweet.

Editordude: San Diego Bay suffered through the Trump Boat Parade #2 in on Sunday. Luckily, no boats were swamped here – but other Trump boat parades keep sinking other boats.

5 boats sank in Texas just recently. In mid-August, on the Willamette River just north of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, a small motorboat that was not involved with the boat parade capsized due to the many rocking wakes. On Sunday, a Trump parade in Wisconsin resulted in a docked boat capsizing. “The waves were probably four to five footers pounding my boat into the dock,” Keith Smith, an observer whose neighbor’s boat was capsized. “Boaters all know they’re responsible for their waves, but nobody cared. They just kept going and going and hooting and hollering. Luckily I didn’t slip and go off the side of the dock.”

Locally, the biggest-Trump media supporter, KUSI, predicted there would be 2,000 boats and 50,000 spectators.

Our reporter on the scene Sunday at San Diego Bay filed this post:

By John Michael Williams

I arrived onsite, east-facing Ullman St., and parked under the lone palm tree on the south side of the block, at 12:19PM. It was 93 degrees F according to my car, but haze still veiled the mountain backdrop of the cityscape and bay and bit of white cloud drifted overhead as seven piston-engine planes, in groups of five and two, overflew the bay and left contrails as they passed.

At first glance, it was obvious that this Parade would not replicate the previous one. For one thing, the organizers apparently didn’t ask everyone to show up at noon and get in line as must have happened before because, in Parade I, a knot of boats in very close proximity to each other maneuvered rail-to-rail along the northern edge of the bay heading toward the County building en masse. This time it appears the idea was simply to show up any time between noon and five and follow the same route.

So it was easy to catch up on the count; very few boats were moving along the route and only one was past the east end of Harbor Island, but the stream of sailors honoring the guy continued in steady dribbles of five or six at a time, and by 12:49, I’d stopped counting as the number rose above 350. From there, I packed it in and thought how good an idea the time change had been. It was a much more successful Parade in terms of sailors; there may have been 400 boats, which is a pretty good show.

However, due to the almost single file nature of the flow of boats, each boat or small group got it’s own two minutes of observation without fanfare as it began the route. The overall effect was a somber, sedate, quiet, funeral-like procession, with no boisterousness evident from the hillside; really quite unTrumplike in it’s way.

As previously reported regarding Boat I, ‘news’ outlets other than this one, save one, repeated apparently unexamined statements from the organizers, who, not surprisingly, exaggerated the number of boats parading.

On Parade I, CBS SkyRanger reported “dozens of boats” participated. Good for SkyRanger.

Last evening, Parade II was reported in glowing terms by our only local TV programmer sans any mention of the number of boats in the parade. Good for them, too.

Today’s digital SD Union-Tribune does not have a front page article on the parade.

However, regarding other suppliers to San Diego this was found in Google news today. Abbie Alford of the CBS News8 team filed her report Sunday:

SAN DIEGO — The Military Appreciation Channel hosted a President Trump Boat Parade on San Diego Bay near Naval Base Point Loma Sunday from midday into the evening. Thousands of boats took to the water Sunday in San Diego in support of the president. Many were decked out in Trump 2020 flags and red, white and blue.”

It’s a wonderful phrase and sounds really great, like the Greeks setting off for Troy to bring Helen back, and I can’t say it is false because I left, but I do doubt the accuracy of “thousands.”

Given that I quit counting before 1:00 p.m., when no more paraders appeared to be heading toward the start point, and that the event lasted until 5:00, many more boats than the 350+ I saw could have joined in during the unobserved time, but to hit the number reported by CBS8, at least 1,600 more boats would have had to have participated.

Finally, I can say that at the time this CBS8 info was first published, 12:44 PM, it was factually inaccurate that even a certain four hundred boats participated; there simply weren’t that many on the bay by that time.

Here’s a link to John’s report on the first boat parade.