For those who haven’t been in Seattle in August, know ye that the first weekend in August is the annual Seafair event: seafair.com.
Depending on your interests, this could either be a great weekend to head out to Lake Washington or else a great time to hightail it very far out of town.
The signature events in Seafair are the air show and the hydroplane boat races, both centered on the lake. They are very loud. Loud, as in forget about concentrating on anything else if you are within 15 miles of them kind of loud.
This is a big deal for the hometown of Boeing. OK, Boeing moved their corporate headquarters to Illinois some years ago, which technically means Seattle is not its home town anymore, which is a very sore point for long-time Puget Sound people. But anyway…
The air show features the US Navy’s Blue Angels (all Boeing fighter jets, of course) doing their famous aerobatic flying maneuvers over the I-90 bridge on Lake Washington. Since they go kind of fast, it takes them most of King County to make a u-turn, so they are basically strafing the entire Seattle metro area during these shows. They stay sub-sonic, but it’s still pretty damn fast and they fly about 50 feet over the houses near the lake. OK, there was that one year when they made a small oops and launched a few sonic booms right over Madrona Park, but that was totally just because of some fog inversion thing. Or something like that.
I confess to having a perverse fascination with these beasts, even though they are burning about half of Saudi Arabia’s supply of jet fuel in four days here. Amazing engineering and flying. They close the I-90 bridge between Seattle and Mercer Island during the events and you can walk or bike out on to the bridge to watch the fun (and breathe those fumes) up close. Last year, with all of the budget fracas in Congress, they canceled this taxpayer-funded bread and circus show, but it seems now that we’ve forgotten about (I mean, resolved) the budget crisis, they’ll be back.
The hydroplane races are basically like the Indy 500, but on water. Personally, I can see no redeeming value whatsoever in this event — boats zooming around the lake at ridiculous speeds in endless circles? And since that takes place about 1/2 mile from where I live, it’s really fun.
I know there is skill involved in this, but it’s not six fighter jets zooming towards each other from six different points of the compass 30 miles away at 700 miles per hour all converging precisely over the center of the bridge at exactly the same instant and then pulling up and going straight up in the air a mile or two and looping around in a fleur-de-lis pattern and re-converging at the same spot over the bridge, about ten feet above the water with white contrails streaming.
That’s a little different kind of skill, in my opinion.
These two events are on Saturday and Sunday, but they both have practice runs starting on Thursday, so it’s four days of fun and noise.
Enjoy or ignore (if you can)!
I spent the weekend cycling with my friend Jim in Cascade Bike Club‘s annual ride from Seattle to Vancouver, BC: RSVP.
