Opening Day Races and Parade Will be a Great Show

By David Gould

Photo by Stevan Morgain

Thousands of spectators will crowd the Montlake Cut this Saturday, kicking off the Seattle Yacht Club's 91st annual Opening Day.

Thousands more will guide their boats gunwale to gunwale along the log booms in Union Bay.

Sounds from the U.S. Navy Band will spill out over the water and surrounding parks.

And that is just the beginning of this Seattle tradition.

The University of Washington men's and women's crew teams will battle the U.S. Naval Academy and Egyptian Olympic teams in the Windermere Cup rowing regatta.

Spectators will then watch as nearly 200 brightly decorated boats, festooned with colorful spinnakers and manned with boat crews bedecked in blue blazers, white trousers and tam-o'-shanters parade down the Montlake Cut.

Bob Ernst, coach of the University of Washington men's crew team, says that Opening Day is part of Seattle's culture.

"I think it's the best free show in the whole country."

The history of this widely storied event runs deep in Seattle.

The Elliott Bay Yacht Club, forerunner of the Seattle Yacht Club, held a regatta in Elliott Bay as early as 1895. The first mention of the term "Opening Day," however, was in 1909 when the boating season opened on May 1, and the club featured a race between three of its fastest yachts.

Following the 1920 construction of a new clubhouse on Portage Bay, the Seattle Yacht Club began scheduling Opening Day annually on the first Saturday in May. In 1920, 30 boats maneuvered their way through the Montlake Cut in the first official parade.

Through the years features have been added; in 1940 instructions dictated that all boats be decorated, and by 1946 the first "Admiral of the Day" was named. In 1959, an Opening Day theme was first implemented, and crew racing was an annual event by 1970.

This year the UW men's crew team will attempt a tenth successive Windermere Cup victory against the Egyptian and U.S. Naval Academy teams. The women will seek to win their eighth Windemere Cup in their last 14 tries.

Ernst says the races will go on no matter what the weather, though last year the race distance was chopped because of high seas caused by 25 knot winds.

By noon, the yachts will begin to parade through the Cut, decorated to this year's theme of dot.com. Crews will try to outdo one another in front of the judges with their costumes, salutes, and boat maneuvers.

This year the Seattle Yacht Club will invite commercial advertising for the first time in the form of a "Decorated Commerce" class within the parade.

"Boats decorated with a theme have been dwindling," said Lon Davidson, this year's Admiral of the Day. Davidson says they decided to add the commerce theme to get more entries.

Some of the real crowd-pleasers, according to Davidson, are the working boats like the tractor tugs spinning circles, the coastguard ships, and the fireboats cascading clouds of spray.

For Davidson, this is his year. He has been on the Opening Day committee for twenty years and was chosen by his peers to be admiral.

"It," said Davidson smiling broadly, "is once in a lifetime."

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