Santa Maria Event

It's over and it was a success. We worried for the last few weeks about the weather. The river flooded multiple times this Spring but it was back around normal levels by last week. The forecast was for rain all three days but we got lucky. The rain completely missed us on Friday and we only got a bit of rain on Saturday. That left us with a wet Sunday.

One immediate problem was launching the boats. We had planned on using both of my boats but there was a significant amount of mud on the boat ramp from the flooding. Michael and I removed the crown of this with a shovel and mattock then launched the Black Sheep. I decided that the ramp was too chancy to launch the Firefly. If we had rain then the ramp would become too slick to retrieve the boats. Also, we had some last-minute cancellations so we did not need the extra boat.

We had a nearly full crew by Friday night.

On Saturday the city was hosting a Race for the Cure and people had trouble getting to the ship. Next year we will probably move to the 3rd weekend to avoid this. The race was over by opening time and we had enough time to hold a safety meeting and assign people to the ship and the boats.

Everything went well on Saturday. Attendance was down a little, probably because of threat of rain, but it was still well above normal. The battle went perfectly. Diosa did a great job of organizing the visitors as defenders. This time we had boarders from both boats - six in all and we made the defenders stand back until they were on deck before fighting.

Because a front was moving in, the gunfire was especially loud. We had a brief shower after the battle then it cleared up again.

This time we had people go through the ship on self-guided tours. This meant fewer breaks for the crew but we didn't have unmanageably large tour groups.

After closing, Ed, Margarita, and I spent an hour or so swapping tunes and singing shanties.

The rain moved in in earnest on Sunday. The Hard Tackers were performing but had to move onto the ship. This made things a little crowded.

It was too wet to use the boats so we did an abbreviated battle. I issued boarding pikes to the visitors and alternated having them threaten imaginary pirates and having people fire from the shelter of the awning.

Things broke up earlier than when we have clear weather so everything was cleared off of the ship by closing.

I left the Black Sheep at the ship, tied off to the ship's canoe and the final eight of us had pizza.