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Floats afloat
King Harbor’s Christmas parade brings holiday cheer to the harbor
by Jason Dietrich
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Santa (Donny Demarse) gets down with the Blues Brothers Jake and Elmo (Joel Schaefer and "Skeeter" DuBois) aboard the Huh Dad 2 at the Ninth Annual King Harbor Yacht Club Christmas boat parade. The brothers blues, along with their polar bear toting giant iceberg complete with smoke machine, baby grand piano and ice dancers took home the grand prize. |
While Jack Frost wasn’t nipping any noses over the weekend, Santa Claus, Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney and the Blues Brothers were getting into the Christmas spirit at Redondo Beach’s King Harbor Saturday for the Ninth Annual King Harbor Yacht Club Christmas Boat Parade.
The gangways and docks were packed with jolly spectators and the King Harbor Yacht Club was close to overflowing as merrymakers from all around the South Bay crowded the harbor area for Redondo’s answer to the Rose Parade. The event raised over $6,000 for youth charities like the King Harbor Youth Foundation, the Sea Scouts, and Let’s Go Fishing, which arms underprivileged children with rods and reels and sends them after halibut, rock cod or sculpin.
Two dozen groups of boaters entered the contest, slathering their boats with fake snow, stringing up Christmas lights and propping up artificial snowmen to fit with the "It’s a great white Christmas" theme.
"From our vantage point it was a good turnout. We had a lot of people on the property, watching from the hotel lobby and the seawall" said Portofino Marina manger Lori Benjamins.
The Body Glove company motor yacht, the "Disappearance," served as the flagship, with celebrity parade marshal Mickey Rooney on board. Decked out in blue lights from stem to stern as part of a "Keep your ocean blue" theme, the "Disappearance" made five laps of the marina with Rooney, the star of films like "It’s a Mad Mad Mad World" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" standing in the stern on one pass waving to the crowd.
Fans were disappointed when Rooney didn’t make a scheduled stop inside the King Harbor Yacht Club. According to "Disappearance" skipper Bobby Meistrel, the Hollywood legend hardly left the boat’s enclosed rear deck and Meistrel’s on-board guests were instructed not to ask Rooney for autographs or take photos.
The King Harbor Fishing Fleet took home the grand prize for best floating float. They transformed Barry Anderson’s 42-foot fishing boat the "Huh Dad 2" into an iceberg for their "White Rocking Christmas," float. Fishermen got together to built a stage on the front of the boat so Joel Schaefer and "Skeeter" DuBois could get their collective mojos working as the skinny tie bedecked duo, the Blues Brothers. They got some help kickstarting those mojos from a trailing dingy full of cola chugging polar bears and a trio of dancers frolicking on what looked like a frozen pond. Donny Demarse joined in as Santa Claus, jamming on an electric guitar from the boat’s tower, while DuBois tinkled the ivories of a snow white baby grand piano borrowed from Anderson’s living room.
"The idea was that Santa had commandeered the polar bears’ iceberg to bring down some rocking Christmas Cheer to Redondo Beach," said Anderson, who serves as the King Harbor Yacht Club Fishing Fleet Captain and the chairman of Let’s Go Fishing Foundation. "One of our passes we nailed it perfectly. We had Bruce Springsteen cranking just as we got in front of the yacht club."
It took about a month to plan the prize-winning float and a week to hammer it all together. Fishermen used more than 140 33-gallon trash bags stuffed with newspapers and 30 white linen sheets to make the contours of the iceberg. They built a snowbank around the piano player from 400 pounds of rock salt.
"Now all that’s left is three weeks of demolition and clean up," said Anderson
The fishing fleet’s display was toned down a bit from last year, when Anderson and co. suspended a 740-pound stuffed mako shark from a hoist on the front of the "Huh Dad 2," in line with three of the shark’s smaller relatives. The boat’s tower was done up to look like Santa’s sleigh. Santa led the display from a dingy in front of the boat hooked to the lead shark via a string of Christmas lights and a full shark fishing rig.
"Santa had stopped his sleigh in Redondo Beach, and a gang of rein-sharks had made off with his sleigh. So Santa called on the King Harbor fishing fleet to help get it back," said Anderson.
The display presumable left too many unanswered questions in the minds of last year’s judges, such as what exactly happened to Santa’s reindeer, and the float got second place.
"We were a bit too over the top I guess," Anderson said.
This year, Peter Ellis’s "Windsong" took first place in the over 30-foot class. Mac McClellan’s "Sharon G." took second, decorated with a trio of gigantic snowmen as the three wise men.
The under 30-foot category was won by Michael O’Brian’s "Just a little defiant," with a "Santa’s two-harbor express" theme. The crowd-pleasing motor dinghy, carrying a gang of lighted reindeer with Rudolph in the bow zipped in and out of the other contenders and into first place. Second was the KH youth foundation’s "Coach Boat," an inflatable raft made up to look like Santa’s sleigh pulled by 8-foot sailboats decorated with reindeer.
This year’s strong turnout of both entries and spectators has yacht club officials enthusiastic about next year’s 10th anniversary parade, despite this year’s slow start. A week before the event, parade planners were fretting, as only eight entries had signed up. But 14 boats signed up in the next week, and two boats joined the day of.
"Hopefully will have learned not to worry so much about getting enough entries. A lot of boats enter at the last minute. We just need to relax a little," said King Harbor Yacht Club Commodore Bill Webster.ER