Friday, December 30, 2011

New Year’s Eve Eve

With Christmas in the rearview mirror, it seems the next big thing on the minds of Astorians is whether or not the ships are going to sound off at midnight tomorrow night.

The silence last year was deafening.  I noted then that I was surprised at the reaction.  I knew I was disappointed, but then I’m weird that way, so I rather doubted that it made any difference to anyone else.

It did, and to a lot more people than I had expected. 

After hearing all of this after the fact, I wasn’t much surprised to find that someone else had done what I had intended to do earlier… asked Joanne Rideout to get involved. 

If you missed today’s edition of The Ship Report on KMUN, it will still be available at www.shipreport.net for a while, but the basic takeaway on the subject is that after talking to the bar pilots about the issue, they’ll be passing the word to inbound ships’ crews that a little letting off of steam (or compressed air, as the case really is) at midnight on New Year’s Eve is a welcome thing to those of us ashore.

No guarantees are offered, but the word is going out.

Joanne’s follow-on suggestion is a great one.  If you’re within earshot of the ships and have a line of sight to them at midnight, send some kind of light signal back to them!  Car headlights, house lights, whatever.  It would be a rare opportunity to have direct, if not that personal interaction with the crews on the river.

So, I’m passing the word.  I know that there are readers out there.  Statcounter tells me so.  Some of them are even from the Astoria area.  Pass the word yourselves if you like the foghorns, and send some sort of signal back to the crews on the ships.

At the moment there are only three ships showing in the anchorage, but that can change.  Last year there were five ships and a tug anchored, and another ship in transit at the turn of the year.  That would have made a nice chorus!

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