Have you held a wide-eyed child as a beautiful float glides down Fourth Avenue, craned your neck skyward as the Blue Angels suddenly disappear from view, gasped for air as a hydroplane comes out of the north turn bouncing from sponson to sponson? These are just a few of the exhilarating moments you might experience at Seafair.
It’s Seattle’s traditional summer festival. A month-long, region-wide barbecue, that brings an entire community together in celebration. For 58 years Seafair has been about community events, parades, Miss Seafair, the Navy and Coast Guard, amateur athletics, airplanes and of course, boat racing. Most of all, Seafair has been about people and it continues to be.
There are more than 5,000 Seafair volunteers, hundreds of thousand of spectators who come out for the parades and hydroplane races, thousands more that participate in the half marathon, torchlight run and triathlon and the youth who participate in the Miss Seafair Scholarship.
It’s about Drill Teams who practice for hours each week to synchronize their movements, hydroplane crews that fine tune helicopter turbine engines to perfection, the Pirates and Clowns that visit hospitals and convalescent centers in the “off-season” and marching bands that rehearse songs and steps for weeks in preparation of their performances in neighborhoods and through the streets of downtown.
Behind the scenes is a dedicated 40-member Board of Directors, a talented year-round staff of only 12 and a dozen seasonal staff and summer interns that bring it all together.
Seafair is for everyone. Most events are still free and as a recent local newspaper column stated, it’s a part of what makes up a “Quintessential Northwesterner”. Come, and be a part of one of the happenings that makes the Puget Sound area such a great place to live.
