Almost Missed It

The last two times we went to the Huntington Harbor Boat Parade (2014, 2018), we got there 'round about 5 PM and waited until the boats arrived after 7 PM. So, this year, we were going to be clever and get there after 6 PM.

So, we'd gotten our chairs set up, and I had even taken a test picture...

...when we talked to a passerby. Who told us the boats had been there about an hour previous...

Seriously? The one year we don't go early...

A boat did come by...

But it was clear we had missed the festivities. Doh!

After a quick search online, a map was found of the parade route. The boats had been scheduled to get to our location at 5:15 PM. But...

This area has a lot of channels of water. It'd be best if you take a look at the map...

We were at location number 4. It's nearly at the top of the map. Right next to it is a strip of green. And next to that is location 31, which had the not yet reached time of 7:56 PM.

The strip of green is actually a bridge. The boats didn't go under the bridge but came back around to it. In previous years, they hit that side of the bridge first. But if the map was correct, we had over an hour to kill (just like in previous years).

So, we came later, and we still had to wait. Although, we weren't sure if we had missed it entirely. Since we were already there, we decided to wait.

As the time drew closer, a crowd had gathered on the bridge...

We joined them, and we waited. And waited. It was nearly 8:15 PM when we spied...

We hadn't missed it after all. Whew.

And somehow, I have managed to figure out how to work my phone camera so that I could get pretty decent images, unlike the prior two times. It turns out night photos take 3 seconds, but I could turn that off so the image just captures with no upload time. (I'm not sure what this is called.)

Not all the images came out, because moving boats, but after that first test boat (second picture in this post), more of them came out decently than not.

I'll save most of those pictures for tomorrow, although I posted a few of them yesterday. (So many photos came out I was able to make three posts out of them. Success.)

But I'll close this post with the last boat of the parade. They really went all out with this...

It was really, really tall. And impressive.