I’m not sure how many of y’all out there reading my blog (yeah, all 10 of you…) own a boat. Here’s a fun fact: they’re actually kinda expensive to park! Considering it’s over $6 to park a car in Bremerton anyway, that shouldn’t have surprised me at all, but either way here we are. Jason had a plan for this though because he always has a plan: we’re going to join the Port Orchard Yacht Club! Ok, excellent! Only… if you’ve been reading any of my blog at all, even like just scrolling through quickly, you may have noticed that Jason and I like to fill our days with randomness, outdoors, and shenanigans and may not be the stereotypical “yacht club” type. Again…here we are. Aside from maybe two other couples in their 40’s we’re the youngest there by at least 30 years.
In an effort to blend in and participate, Jason volunteered our boat to be the “santa boat” in the club’s annual lighted boat parade around Puget Sound. They had been sadly begging for volunteers for the last 3 meetings, so I guess he just figured “what the hell” and that they’d be extra grateful. (spoiler alert: it worked.) Either way, the plan is to decorate the everloving shit out of your boat with christmas lights, rendezvous at the south end of Blake Island and follow “Rudolph” the lead boat back to the yacht club with santa on our boat reading out the names of local children.
Another fun little fact about Jason and I: between the two of us, we have never hung Christmas lights. I love Christmas, but why bother hanging up all the stupid lights and untangle them and deal with the bulbs etc? So I never did. So Jason and I march down to Lowe’s the first weekend of December with the intent of buying a whole pallet of lights so our boat is the gleaming star of the show. I was informed a few days later at work that you buy the lights AFTER christmas is over and they’re on sale for 90% off. Great. I also underestimated (despite my theoretically good math skills…) the length of our boat. she’s 50′ long. So to have one string of lights on a single side is 5 strands of lights. We managed to get just enough lights to make her not look depressing, but I’m not spending $1000 on freaking christmas lights. Jason also decided that we needed something large and bright on the top deck so we nailed some spare wood together and made these HUGE boxes that we wrapped even more lights around. Game on.
The weather was forecast to be terrible… like 30* and raining and windy with a small craft advisory thrown in just to complicate matters. However we actually lucked out and it didn’t rain. It was windy enough to not have santa bouncing around on the top of the boat with nothing to hold onto so we moved him up to the bow of the boat. Also, my present that I spent so much time working on? It fell off the back of the boat about 10 minutes into this whole adventure. >:/ #THISISWHYWECANTHAVENICETHINGS
The cruise itself was uneventful for the most part. I was “chief hydration engineer” and kept the coffee pot pretty much full. (we will disregard the fact that it was mostly just me drinking the coffee.) We had a borrowed PA system on the boat and Jason and the voice of Santa were up front in the pilothouse, so Rashell and I spent a very relaxing evening sitting in the living room reading books and taking photos of things. “Santa” brought sandwich materials but forgot the bread, so we all made meat rolls of some kind. It worked out. No one was going to starve.
Did you notice where I said “uneventful for the most part”? Yeah, that’s relevant… So the lead boat Rudolph was in charge of the route back home in the dark. All of a sudden I hear the engines rev up and the boat stop abruptly. Now, Jason doesn’t generally do something like that without a damn good reason so Rashell and I scurry up top to see what’s going on. Apparently, Rudolph had run into part of the large metal “fish pens” that are moored out in the passage. Whoops! 😮 So we idle around a bit while he calls the coast guard to report a hole in the bow of his boat, verify his bilge pumps work, and regroup the crew. Eventually we all reconvene back at the yacht club. The damage was way more substantial in the light. The entire bow of the boat was cracked and there was a gigantic hole in the front. I’m curious as to whether or not the boat is totaled! Either way, rough night for that guy.
Obviously I was ON my boat, so the only photos I have of her all dressed up are from the marina. I was asked if I wanted to use my fancy camera to take photos of the other boats for the club’s website. Sure thing! 😉 Seeing as I was shooting moving objects from a moving object in the dark you’re going to have to forgive my grainy and slightly blurry photos. I did the best that I could with the manual focus lens I was borrowing. 😉 </excuses>
Hell, we might even volunteer next year! 😉