DECK the HULLS : Lightbulbs and a Few Ho-Ho-Hos Won’t Do

Late last month, far from prying eyes in an isolated, ramshackle workshop in the lonely neighborhood near the Long Beach shipping docks, Bobby Cornelius began building a rocket.

It was a big one, nearly 60 feet long, and it took up most of the length of the shop. It would be fitted with two booster engines that would expel plumes of bright blue flame, illuminating the glittering silver coating on the fuselage.

Because the massive rocket was too long to be shipped in a single section, Cornelius would separate it into halves and transport it on a trailer to his waiting boat at San Pedro.

There, he would fix it to the side of the boat, sail it to Orange County, fire it up and be carried to fame and glory for yet another year.

It’s a lot of work to whip up a little Christmas spirit, but Cornelius said one little rocket amounts to just about the standard effort of the Cornelius faction when the boat parade season rolls around.

For Cornelius and dozens of other boat owners who decorate their craft with wreaths and garlands, huge inflatable Santas, dizzying light displays, live carolers and animated characters to compete in the county’s three holiday season boat parades, ‘tis the season to be gaudy.

The three parades--in Huntington Harbour, Newport Harbor and Dana Point Harbor--are the county’s waterborne, nocturnal versions of more standard, daytime, land-based holiday parades elsewhere.

While they are among the best known and attended of the county’s traditional yearly events, they have retained a decidedly local tone, for all boats in the parades are prepared and sailed by their owners and the owners’ families and friends.

It’s been common practice for companies and other groups to charter yachts sailing in the parade for on-board Christmas parties. This year, however, that practice sputtered and even stopped for some when the Coast Guard announced it was broadening its interpretation of a federal boating regulation defining a commercial charter. Coast Guard officials first said they would prevent boats from participating in the parade if the craft were used for office parties but didn’t conform to stringent design and safety standards for charters.

Then, after howls of protest, the Coast Guard backed off, but not before some charters had already been canceled. The situation, however, never really threatened to halt any of the parades.

Decorating the boats has become a kind of December cottage industry for the entrants. That doesn’t mean, however, that the results are amateurish or jury-rigged. Many of the entries, in fact, are the results of hundreds of man hours, thousands of dollars, days of traveling and stacks of design sheets, wood, plastic and lights.

For the most part, a simple string of blinking bulbs and a few ho-ho-hos won’t do it. But a rocket just might. Again.

Cornelius, this year’s rocket man, may be the best-known entrant in any of the county’s boat parades. A former multiple sweepstakes award winner in both the Huntington Harbour and Newport Beach parades, Cornelius’ name pops up whenever spectacular boat decoration is mentioned.

“The No. 1 boat (over the years) in both the Huntington Harbour and Newport Beach parades has probably been Cornelius,” said Richard Luehrs, the president of the Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce, the sponsor of the Newport Beach parade.

The Cornelius group has perhaps won the most notice for the use of large lighted balloons, nearly 25 feet high, in the shapes of Santa Clauses, teddy bears, snowmen and other characters that have been inflated and fixed to the deck.

This year, he is entering the rocket. Made from a huge concrete forming tube, it will be attached to the side of Cornelius’ 65-foot cabin cruiser, the Merry Maker. The rocket, Cornelius said, will be surmounted by an 18-foot figure of Santa Claus, which will be posed seated on the rocket.

The “booster rocket” in the tail section will be powered by butane and will “shoot flames out about 15 feet behind the boat,” he said.

The entire affair will weigh in at about 2,000 pounds, said Cornelius, an industrial property developer and boat builder who lives in Newport Beach.

In previous years, he has attached a hot-air balloon to his boat (“That was really outstanding, a real mind-blower”), as well as a Santa’s workshop scene, complete with children dressed as elves and a 36-foot-tall mouse.

“It is a lot of work,” he said, “but a lot of people jump in to help us, and it’s just a fun thing to do. A lot of kids come on the boat with us, and they really enjoy it.”

Other owners also use the occasion to hold parties aboard their boats during the parade, Luehrs said, which can eat up still more money, particularly during the Newport Beach parade, which is held on seven successive nights.

“People can spend just about as much as they want,” he said. “A lot of them are going to spend lots of time and money decorating the boats, and even driving them around the harbor can be expensive. Sometimes it can be a relatively significant expense.”

How significant? Luehrs said the decorating, fuel and a week of parties could put a big hole in $20,000.

The tab doesn’t have to run that high, however. In Huntington Harbour, where the two-night parade, known as the “Symphony of Lights,” is sponsored by the Huntington Harbour Philharmonic Committee, local entrants often work within a budget.

One group, the Huntington Harbour Newcomers (made up of relatively new residents of the area), set a $650 budget for themselves at an October meeting, said Barbara Snegg, one of the club’s members.

“The money comes from the dues of the club,” she said. “We don’t have thousands of dollars to go out and get someone to design the decorations for us. We do it all ourselves.

“Part of the fun is getting elaborate, and it’s a wonderful creative outlet. Everybody just crawls all over the boat saying, ‘Let’s see if we can do it.’ Of course, there are times when we say, ‘Hey, we’re getting a little crazy here. We can’t do that.’ But it’s a great way to make new friends and meet new neighbors. We do it for the enjoyment of it.”

The Newcomers’ boat, club member John Vellis’ 65-foot yacht Gimi, carries the name Harbour Belle for the parade because it will be fitted with a lighted rear paddle wheel prop. It will also be festooned with large musical notes attached to a lighted musical staff that will wrap around the hull.

Not everyone goes it alone, however. Occasionally--because the boat may be large or the owner may be busy--lighting and decoration consultants are called in.

David Oldfield, who operates a theatrical design and special-effects business in Garden Grove, said his seasonal boat decorating sidelight “has increased rather dramatically this year. It seems that people are getting more elaborate about what they’re doing, but they may not be sure of how to go about it themselves. So they consult with people like me.”

Most boat owners avoid using extensive special effects, Oldfield said, “because they have limited power to run those kinds of things on the boat, and they don’t want to eat all of it up.”

Decorative and spot lighting, along with static figures, continue to be the most requested items, he said.

Kevin Doherty, a commercial and residential lighting designer for Dekra-Lite, a Huntington Beach lighting design company, said that while he will provide boat owners with nearly any kind of lighting their craft can handle, “some of the owners head up their own companies where they can draw on people from, say, their own art department to help out with the designs. They have their own resources.”

A custom lighting job, he said, can run from $300 to $1,000, depending on the size of the boat and the lavishness of the display.

Still, parade organizers and others said, most of the entrants prefer to do it themselves. And some tasks are larger than others.

Decorating the tall ship Resolution, a 92-foot, three-masted schooner, involves stringing lights into the high rigging, said Tamara Spieler, co-owner of the ship, which is hired out for charter during the Newport Beach parade.

“We’ve lit up the whole top rigging like a Christmas tree,” she said, and we’ve made these big presents that we put under the lighted Christmas tree up on the top deck. And we have garlands and lights on the deck house. We can do a tremendous amount of decorating because we’re so large.”

However, she said, the crowds of boats that gather around the Resolution during parades don’t come necessarily to see the lights.

“Our key weapon,” Spieler said, “is Jim Mahoney. He’s our singing Santa Claus. He gets up on the top deck and sings, and so many boats come around to hear that one year we couldn’t get through them for an hour and a half.”

Mahoney’s voice, along with the other live music and amplification used on the Resolution, earned the ship the parade’s best sound award 3 years running, she said.

Once many of the boat owners get it right once, they make sure they’ll remember how to do it next time, said Rudy Baron, a longtime Newport Beach parade entrant and a judge this year.

“A lot of them pretty much set up the same thing year after year,” he said. “Once you get the lights right once, you take them down and mark where they were--a green light here, or a red light here--for the following year.”

For Baron, matters are less complex. He said he always decorates his 49-foot yacht Baroness with white lights only--”except last year, we put up five plastic snowmen that we found in a Christmas store in Long Island. They were too big for UPS, so we had to ship them back on a Greyhound bus.”

Decorating innovations often catch on quickly and are often widely copied in successive years. Today, computerized lighting, in which a computer on board causes the lights to fire in certain sequences, creating shapes or effects or spelling out words, is common.

James Dunning, UC Irvine’s director of admissions, was probably the first boat owner to use computers in his lighting display in the late 1970s, along with Dan Richardson, a UCI engineering graduate.

“We were the forerunners,” he said. “The interesting thing was that the computer system he developed was intended to run a rent-out disco party lighting system. We just adapted it to run on the boat.”

Dunning’s Mariner 40 sailboat was rigged with strings of lights ascending to the top of the mast, where a 16-spoke star was fixed. The lights fired in dozens of sequences.

“I don’t think we ever officially entered the parade,” Dunning said. “But the judges would always chase us around and say, ‘You’re wonderful, you’re wonderful! Who are you?’ You could say we were the Flying Dutchman of the parade.”

All three parades in the county are competitive, with trophies awarded to winners in several categories. Most owners, however, say they expend the time and the money for the same reason landlubbers decorate Christmas trees and hang holly wreaths.

Still, in the pantheon of boat paraders, competition occasionally flourishes.

“There’s a lot of kidding (among entrants) about the competition aspect of it,” Cornelius said. “One guy will beat me and kid me about it, and then I’ll beat him and kid him about it. But I’ll say he ain’t gonna beat me this year.”

Gene Wilson, Cornelius’ nephew and business partner, designed his uncle’s beloved rocket.

“We do it mainly because it’s something that my little girl and my uncle’s grandkids enjoy, and our friends and neighbors,” Wilson said. “My uncle’s just a big kid at heart. And it doesn’t seem like Christmas unless we’re out decorating the boat.”

CHRISTMAS PARADE OF LIGHTS--Evenings, Dec. 17-23

(All times are approximate)

Time Location 1 6:30 START--off Collins Isle 2 6:34 Balboa Island-North Bayfront 3 6:36 Balboa Island Bridge, Shark Island Yacht Club 4 6:47 Reuben E. Lee Restaurant 5 6:49 Bay Shores Community Beach 6 6:54 Balboa Bay Club, Orange Coast College, Crew Base, Boy Scouts of America, Sea Scouts Base 7 6:58 Grandstand Viewing Area, Newport Area Chamber of Commerce 8 6:59 Cano’s Restaurant 9 6:59 Newport Theatre Arts Center, Newport Heights 10 7:00 South Shore Yacht Club, Josh Slocums Restaurant, Ancient Mariner Restaurant 11 7:01 Rusty Pelican Restaurant, Chart House Restaurant 12 7:02 John Dominis Restaurant, Villa Nova Restaurant, Mastroianni’s, Jay’s Catering and Promises Restaurant 13 7:03 The Warehouse Restaurant, Lido Marina Village Shops 14 7:05 Lido Park 15 7:09 Via Lido North Beach 16 7:21 Lido Isle Yacht Club 17 7:32 Lido Peninsula 18 7:34 Marina Park 19 7:35 American Legion Yacht Club, 15th Street Beach 20 7:39 9th Street Beach, Newport Harbor Yacht Club 21 7:45 Bay Isle Channel 22 7:49 Newport Landing Restaurant, Parker’s Seafood Grill, Balboa Peninsula Ferry Landing 23 7:51 Tale of the Whale Restaurant, Balboa Pavilion 24 8:01 Peninsula Point Beach 25 8:05 Pirate’s Cove, Channel Reef 26 8:10 Coast Guard-Harbor Master Dock, Balboa Yacht Club 27 8:13 Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club 28 8:15 Balboa Island Bridge 29 8:18 Little Island Beach, Little Island Point 30 8:24 Balboa Island, South Bayfront 31 8:28 Balboa Island Ferry Landing 32 8:30 FINISH--off Collins Isle