Sailing the Northwest

At this glorious time of year, many of us boating folks are not just working in our gardens but also on our boats and not just for the coming season but for one or more of the Springtime parades coming up. The Northwest’s biggest and best known marine parades no doubt are the Daffodil Parade in Tacoma (April 19) and the Opening Day Parade (May 3) through the Mountlake Cut in Seattle. Both encourage spectators to come by boat or on land and a lot of information can be found on respective Web sites as to where to go and how to behave (e.g. on the log boom).

The hosting clubs (Tacoma Yacht Club & Seattle Yacht Club), of course, also invite other clubs and their sail- and motor boats to participate in the parades themselves and compete for the various awards for decorations, seamanship, etc. Thus, many clubs from around the Sound, Lake Washington, Lake Union & Portage Bay are — as we write this — busily recruiting workers and cleaning and preparing their volunteered flagships for these events. Again this year, the themes of the two parades are so similar that one suspects collusion: “Carnival, a Parade and Circus” for the Daffodil Parade and “A Three Ring Circus” for Opening Day. Clearly, there could be scale economies in responding to the circus theme if a club sends boats and participants to both parades, just think of learning and practicing the desired circus skills to be performed on the boat deck!

No doubt there will be similarities in the decorations as well, as there were last year with overlapping musical themes inspite of the fact that the use of thousands of Daffodils are required in Tacoma. There are rumors that the colossal “heads” and moving (singing) lips of the entries of the Bremerton Yacht Club (which won the overall awards in both parades!) were based on the same basic skull structure. You can find clips of these two award winning entries on YouTube: Daffodil and Elvis at Opening Day.

(Photos by Bremerton Yacht Club)

See you at the parade(s)!