It's that time of year again. Time flies when you are having fun! We've been participating in the La Conner boat parade since we moved here in 2003. We watched it in 2002 and decided that if we moved here this parade would become a tradition for us. We have done it every year since, except one year when the weather was absolutely terrible with very cold temps and high winds. We instead gathered on our boat tied safely in its slip, with our friends, and turned on the boat lights.
This year's parade theme was "Rudolf and his friends." Kathy came up with the idea of making the side of our flybridge a giant sleigh with Santa riding inside, and friend Jen convinced Kathy that it could be done. A rope would lead to the bow where a large herd of reindeer would be towing the sleigh. The herd of reindeer would be all of the kids that come along in our annual tradition.
That plan all sounded great, until I started with a blank piece of paper and tried to figure out how I was going to make it happen. Sounds easy enough, but I struggled with the concept for a day before coming up with some possible ideas. Once I had the basic idea figured out I printed out a picture of our boat on our broken laser printer (something in the toner cartridge has fallen apart and the resulting printout is, well, quite unique) and sketched out what I was going to try to do.
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| How do I make a sleigh out of the rope light we already have? Hmmmm... |
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| The boat parade concept. Our printer is broken, can you tell? Hint, Hint Santa! |
I started on Saturday the weekend before the parade to make the sleigh. The sleigh was the 'centerpiece' of the decorations and if I couldn't pull it off, there would still be time to do something else. 3-4 horus of work with some wood scraps, about 50' of PEX flexible plumbing pipe, about 80' of rope light, and a few hundred wire ties to hold it all together, it was starting to take shape. Much to my surprise, it looked pretty good once darkness arrived and I turned on the lights. We invited our usual boat parade crowd over for dinner at our house on Sunday and several of us guys went down to finish the decorations. Even with 4 of us putting up lights we worked on it for a few hours. It's a lot of work decorating a boat!
I know you are dying to see the boat, so here it is:
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| "Synergy" ready for the 2010 boat parade. |
On the day of the big even we took the boat over to the La Conner marina guest dock for a free night of moorage and to gather with all of our yacht club friends on the dock. We had a great time and there was a light dinner before the parade at the clubhouse.
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| Boats gathering on Satruday for the parade. |
About an hour before the parade start our friends started arriving at our boat. We had the Daltons (Mark, Jenn, Aidan, Grace), the Southards (Jamie, Sarah, Braden, Will, Emily), the Schornack kids (Vaughn, Mason, Tess), and the Swigerts (Steve, Sue, Aubrey). That's a boat full, for sure. At parade time it was pretty warm (upper 40's) but the rain had arrived and was coming down strong and steady. Our plan was to have the kids on the bow singing Christmas carols but the rain certainly made that a bit less appealing to the kids. Fortunately these kids were in the Christmas spirit and belted out "Rudolf the red-nose reindeer" as we passed by the parade judging boat. Only a few kids were left on the bow by the time we got to the end of town, but several of the Mom's were still singing up a storm. What troupers!
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| Looking good! |
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| It's fun walking the dock on parade night. |
After the parade was the always fun Swinomish Yacht Club party. The house band rocked the clubhouse all night long. There was great food and lots of friends to talk to. Santa even made an appearance, arriving on a big red firetruck!
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| Kevin tells Santa what he wants this year!!! :-) |
The highlight of the event for Kathy and I though was when the awards for the best decorated boats were presented. Guess who took first place? We did! Wow, that's two years in a row. I don't see how I can keep this streak going, as I really struggled with the whole sleigh project. I wonder what the theme will be next year, and what Kathy and Jenn will come up with to challenge me.
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