Seven thirty am was far too early to arrive on the water to float about at that most quintessential of northwest summer events: Seafair, with its culmination of its events: the hydroplane races and the Blue Angles. It was cloudy, cool and threatened drizzle.
After three hours on the water with a scant sighting of boats we feared the day might be a bust when right around 11:30 hundreds of mossbacks in their various flotation devices ranging from 100 foot yachts to little over-packed motorboats came out to enjoy the day in spite of the weather. The Viking hats, one with horns and one with wings were last minute additions to our day’s supplies and turned out to be our most important. Turns out everyone love a Viking. Could have been a lot of things. A lot of Minnesota fans in the crowd. The large ratio of Scandinavian blooded people in the area who love boats. I suppose it could have been the oars, or the t-shirts we were throwing.
Although we their was always one Viking helmed man at the oars a lot of people perceived our boat as solar powered due to the large solar panel we have on the stern of the boat. In case someone from the weekend randomly find this blog I just want to state for the record that its way more low tech than that. Human power, what you see is what you get.
As planned the blue angles appeared at 12:30, flying just close enough to the sound barrier for an otherworldly condensation cloud to appear around their craft. It was a great show and the antithesis of our boat. You could not pick two more separate modes of transportation.
Heading back through the jumbled three foot wakes was shockingly reminiscent to some of the rowing we did on the ocean. While a wave pattern would never be as jumbled as it would with hundreds of wakes the effect reminded me of what we dubbed on the ocean as “Angry Little leaguers.” Our oars, build of ash wood (incidentally the same hard wood that baseball bats and Viking spears were built of) would occasionally crack our shins when the waves would rock the boat in an unpredictable fashion. We imagined that coaching a team of disgruntle and angry little leaguers would result in the same painful effect.
A lot of people saw us and it seemed like everyone was taking pictures of us, that was what we hoped for so the day was a success, but then again it could have been the Viking helmets…