Salty Tales from a Pirate Techno Party

First and Foremost -- Sorry for not updating last week, yes we're still alive, BARELY!

It was a long week of cold, rainy days that reminded us that the image Australians like to uphold about their country can be quite the "furphy"- that's Aussie for a tall tale. Like most travelers arriving to the promised land of sunny beaches, surfing, and scorching desert wasteland, we didn't think to pack a few warm sweaters... let alone a pair of slippers. But even the locals were saying it's usually a lot warmer in February in Melbourne (though we don't believe much of what they say anymore). Cold or not, when we received a last-minute invitation to board a pirate-themed birthday party/booze cruise on a boat, we couldn't turn down an opportunity for silly summer Saturday night fun such as this...

After a quick trip to The Reject Shop (the aptly-named dollar store downtown), we were outfitted with classy eye patch/sword/hook get-ups. We raced down to the port, where our pirate boat was scheduled to take off at 6:30pm on Saturday evening. Unfortunately, the sad news came that we weren't partying aboard a proper pirate schooner, it was just your typical harbour-cruising boat. And our group was surprisingly difficult to find- you figure, "ah, just look for a crowd dressed as pirates". OH NO... in Melbourne, pirate-chic has seen a rapid rise in popularity, and everyone around us was dressed like a pirate in one way or another (damn you, puffy shirt!).

Eventually we did find our party, and it was a pretty cool thing that people (in a country which doesn't 'do' Halloween) were keen on dressing up for a theme party. After managing to avoid the $10 cover charge to hop on, we were ushered up the plank for some swashbuckling fun- or so we thought. We were still tied to the dock when the sun set- around 8:00- and when we finally did set off, it was too cold to enjoy the sights outside. Like good pirates, the passengers set to work keeping warm with a steady flow of overpriced bourbon and Coke. (Rum what??) There were plenty of good photo moments, a fake-moustache fashion show courtesy of a fellow pirate who had brought a collection along (Adrian makes a fabulous Freddie Mercury, while Dayle was a not-so-convincing Colonel Sanders) and heaps more "ARRRRRRRR's", and then some squirrelly guy wearing a very un-pirate-like flowered muu-muu (and claiming to be the DJ) decided to flood the boat with the brain-numbing techno music they seem to love here. And that was about the time when we and our Irish friends Claire and Aidan realized our doom.

Watching the lights on the city skyscrapers go by, so near yet so far away, it dawned on us that the idea of hopping on board a pirate party had been so exciting it hadn't even occurred to us that it could possibly suck-- and we'd have no way of escaping. As our boat circled the industrial boatyards with their parked cars sitting with trunks open by the water (get on your cement shoes!), the techno got louder and louder. All we could do was yell across our table to each other and count down the minutes until midnight, when our boat was due to land. We can only imagine how much fun it must have been in the real pirate days, to be trapped on a boat on the high seas, full of unwashed scalawags and scurvy. You know, back before Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley made it cool.

Hopefully our moustaches took the party up 2 notches.