The Seafair Pirates landed on Alki this weekend, just as they always do. Well, that’s not quite true.
There was a time when they were banished from the beach, largely because of my mutinous ways. It all started because the Seafair Pirates weren’t on the highly favored list of West Seattle Hi-Yu President Diane Schutt. They had pissed her off one too many times, largely because they were a bit whiny in the press, claiming that they had come up with the idea of the Pirate Pub Runs we used to do in West Seattle.
She also wasn’t happy that they would make a big deal about landing, but spend less than a half hour on the beach mingling. I know they spend more time there these days, perhaps learning a valuable lesson from the time they were sent packing to Golden Gardens.
I was with the Northwest Pirates at the time. We had mutinied in 1990, taking the original founders and all the entertainers from the Seafair gang. To say there was bad blood between us was an understatement. If you want to know how bad, read Memoirs of a Buccaneer, it’s a hoot!
My ex and I were members of Hi-Yu at the time. So we took the opportunity to pitch a new landing idea. Hi-Yu bought off on it and the Seafair Pirates were without a beach. They finally ended up landing at Golden Gardens, hardly a fitting place to land pirates in Seattle.
Of course, they didn’t exactly give up without a fight. They were pretty pissed off about the whole thing. They bitched, whined and pleaded with Seafair to get them back on Alki, but unfortunately, the landing is West Seattle Hi-Yu’s gig. The pirates and Seafair had no say in the matter..
The guy in the white pants is my brother Jeff. His yearly claim to fame.
But still they tried every trick in the book, which I must admit, is impressively piratical. Unlike this year’s landing, which appropriately used a salvage ship to land them, the landing’s back then were done aboard Washington National Guard landing craft. Yes, your taxpayer’s money hard at work.
They would do the landing under the guise of a training exercise, but they didn’t land any troops, just pirates. And in return, they were paid a garbage can of beer, it being left behind, the other taken ashore with us to be loaded on the Moby Duck.
Unfortunately, the National Guard was caught in the middle. They didn’t like being caught in the crossfire either. But we were all taxpayers and it was pretty hard to meet the request of one group and not the other. They tried their best to repel us with odd requests, like a million dollar liability policy, but I continued to dodge their parries with aplomb. They just couldn’t find a way to get out of the deal and finally acquiesced to our request.
In mid July, the day of the landing finally arrived. We had chartered a posh bus to take us up to Shilshole, no Moby Duck for us. There, two landing craft awaited. One was for us, the other for the Seafair Pirates.
Or so we thought. The Seafair Pirates were still pulling their little tricks (as I said, very impressive). When one of our guys went down to the docks, he was told that both of the craft were for the Seafair Pirates. There were none for us.
Things looked hopeless initially. We thought we had finally been bested. But hey, pirates never give up, especially when we had our secret weapon, Buckwheat.
Buckwheat was an old Navy submariner. He decided this was all nonsense and went down to the docks with a six pack of beer and started shooting the sh** with the National Guard guys. Before you knew it, we had a landing craft at our disposal.
I’m sure the Seafair guys were furious when they arrived an hour or so later, seeing one of the landing craft out on the water already, filled with pirates and wenches. Yes, wenches. We had the honor of landing the first female pirates onto Alki. I’m sure the Seafair gang will counter that they did that along the way, somewhere, somehow. But they don’t have female members even to this day, so I don’t think you can really count a stray floozy who was invited to tag along on the landing, all in the hopes that one of the pirates could land on her later that night.
So off we went. A landing isn’t really as exciting as it seems. It’s not like you’re on a sailing ship, hell, you’re not on any kind of normal ship at all. The landing craft is made to land tanks and soldiers. You can’t even see over the side. There’s no head aboard. It has a big door that comes down on the front that if properly timed with the right tide, puts you on the beach without even getting your feet wet.
This wasn’t always the case. There is a sandbar off Alki that presents some issues. I know this because on my first landing, fellow Seafair Pirate Gary Bratton was so anxious to make it the beach, that he didn’t notice that we had hung up on the sandbar. The landing craft door was already down, so off went Gary.
He disappeared into the hole behind the bar. We waited for him to come bobbing back to the surface, but he didn’t. None of us really wanted to get wet, so we just stood on the edge, wondering what to do if he never came back up.
After what seemed like a lifetime, Gary popped back up to the surface like a cork. He told us later that his pirate boots had sunk into the muddy muck on the bottom and it took all that time to free himself. If he hadn’t I guess he would have had the honor of doing the first Seafair Pirate Drowning at Alki.
Thankfully, we didn’t have to worry about the tide and sandbar this time around. We had checked the tide charts.
When the time came to land, the door opened to an enthusiastic crowd. Three of our wenches led us onto the beach, waving our pirate flag proudly. We stayed for a couple hours, playing with the crowd, performing on stage and entertaining the children before heading up the hill to sing for the elderly as is tradition.
The Seafair gang eventually returned to the beach a couple years later. But the old timers remember the time that they were relegated to a crappy beach to the north, while the mutinous dogs stole Alki and their thunder right out from under them those many years ago.
In the Emerald City, glad I don’t have to do any more landings,
– Robb