Pirate Night at Duck Dodge

Yours truly gets in the spirit of Pirate Night

ARRRRGH! Thar Be Pirates on Lake Union!

Pirate Night is one of the more popular theme nights at the Duck Dodge sailboat race on Seattle’s Lake Union. Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley wannabees escape their office cubicles, shed their street clothes and don pirate swag ranging from elaborate to lame, like mine. We decorated our Coronado 27, Sublime, with two big skull and crossbones flags and a four-foot tall, inflatable parrot that we flew from the backstay until it was blown off and lost at sea.

We cast off our lines and headed out on the bounding main to buckle some swash and test our mettle against the other funky, old boats in the “cruising and slower boat division”, since we couldn’t keep up with the “half-fast” fleet, let alone the “fast” boats.

Our hardy crew included, from left to right, my wife Nola, our cairn terrier Ella, me, Mark Brower, L.B. Day, and Bill Hagstotz behind the lens.

The Seadog Suffers

Our cairn terrier Ella is usually a great boat dog. She has logged many sea miles cruising in the San Juan and Gulf Islands, and has me trained to take her ashore early every morning in the dinghy. We thought she would enjoy being with us for the Duck Dodge race. Boy, were we wrong. We have an invisible fence for Ella at our house that makes her shock collar beep when she gets too close. If she gets even closer to the edge of the yard, she gets a good jolt, so she knows to stay close to the house. I was using a digital stopwatch to time the start of the race, and it beeped every 30 seconds at the same frequency as Ella’s shock collar. Nola had to keep her down below in the cabin to calm her down. Just when her heart would stop pounding, my watch would beep again and she would freak out. So much for bringing Ella along on Duck Dodge races.

Pirate vessels ply the bounding main of Lake Union against a backdrop of the Seattle skyline

Off to the races!

About a hundred boats jockeyed for the start, and then it was off for a lap or two around the lake. We faired reasonably well in the race, but other boats in our class had spinnakers that gave them a speed advantage going downwind. Excuses, excuses. Anyway, it’s not about how well you place in the Duck Dodge, it’s about how much fun you can have without getting into too much trouble. So I tell myself. I do admit to secretly lusting after a gold, silver or bronze duck decal to paste on my boom to prove I got a podium position.

The committee boat for the night was the Mallory Todd, a 65-foot charter schooner. It seems that some of the pirate crews were using compasses that keep spinning around like Captain Jack Sparrow’s, so they had a bit of trouble navigating the race course. Three or four of them crashed into the Mallory Todd with loud crunching sounds that carried across the water. I’m afraid it might be a while before that schooner volunteers to be the committee boat again.


Romance was in the air at the raft party

Floating Pirate Party

After the race, dozens of boats rafted up to the committee boat for the party, where a few hundred scallywags engaged in small talk with a pirate accent. As the sun set, it reflected off the skyscrapers in the Seattle skyline and the clouds turned shades of orange and pink.

Sailing off into the sunset in search of lost gold

About Duck Dodge

The Duck Dodge sailboat races have been held on Seattle’s Lake Union every Tuesday night from Memorial Day to Labor Day since 1974. The races are just for fun, so there are no handicaps used to corrected elapsed time as in serious races. To add to the fun, there are theme nights such as Tropical Night, Pirate Night and Prom Night. To visit the Duck Dodge website, go to http://www.duckdodge.org

Thanks for the photos, Bill!
Many thanks to friend, neighbor, crew member and professional photographer Bill Hagstotz for the great photos in this blog story. To see more of Bill’s work, visit his site at http://www.bhpimages.com/