Crowds Walk on Water, Land in Their Quest for Holiday Weekend Fun

Orange County’s outbound freeways, choked by mid-afternoon Friday, made it look as if no one would be left in Orange County to celebrate during the Memorial Day weekend.

Not so, it turned out.

At 7 a.m. Saturday, the parade began in Newport Beach--at the Newport Dunes boat-launching ramp, which is the only public boat access to the harbor and which had been closed 6 months for renovation.

A procession of several hundred boats glided down the ramp and into Upper Newport Harbor, causing a density of pleasure craft in the harbor that hadn’t been seen since last summer, authorities said.

At 10:30 a.m., a more traditional parade began at the 31st annual Garden Grove Strawberry Festival--originally a harvest festival to celebrate Garden Grove’s huge strawberry crop, but now adays more of a commemoration, since the city’s strawberry fields have dwindled to less than 80 acres. The festival runs through Monday night.

And at 1 p.m., 21 bands of Scottish pipers and drummers paraded into the main arena of the Orange County Fairgrounds to open the United Scottish Society’s 57th Highland Gathering and Festival. It’s the seventh year the celebration has been held in Costa Mesa, and organizers were expecting 30,000 people to attend by the time the event ends Monday afternoon.

Despite cloudy skies and chilly breezes during the morning, the county’s beaches drew hardy crowds, and the county’s camping parks were nearly full.

Saturday’s high temperature in Orange County was 75 degrees in El Toro, well below the record of 91 degrees for a May 27 set in 1968. Highs elsewhere were 74 degrees in Santa Ana, 73 in San Juan Capistrano, 72 in Fullerton and 64 in Newport Beach, up from overnight lows in the low to high 50s, according to the National Weather Service.

Forecasters were predicting similar weather for today.

Tariq Abdrabalrasoul was worried about the overcast weather Saturday morning at Newport Dunes. He and his brother, Amor, both students at Cal Poly Pomona, had towed their 27-foot Bayliner power boat from their home in Diamond Bar to the ramp in Newport Beach for its maiden voyage under their ownership.

“I don’t know how far we’ll go if the weather stays like this,” 24-year-old Tariq said as he sat on the bow and waited for his 26-year-old brother to find a fresh battery. The one on board was dead, and the engine wouldn’t start. Finally, he towed the boat on its trailer out of the water while the battery was changed.

Richard Dorn of Newport Beach, a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, was there offering free safety inspections. The Abdrabalrasouls accepted.

It turned out, Dorn said, that the dead battery had been the most useful safety device aboard their boat. If the engine had started and they had set out, “they wouldn’t have made it halfway out of the bay,” Dorn said.

They did not know that the opening at the bottom of the hull used to drain water from the bilge had been left unplugged, Dorn said.

As for others interested in using the new launching ramp, a spokesman for Newport Dunes said Saturday that construction is continuing, so it will be open only on weekends “for about a month.”

About 100,000 people turned out in Garden Grove to watch marching bands, equestrian units, floats, and celebrities in the Strawberry Festival parade.

“Hey, it’s great, it’s free,” said Mark MacDonald of Huntington Beach, who came to the festival with his wife, Charlotte, and 4-year-old son, Tim. MacDonald, a construction worker, pondered the changes that have taken place over the last 30 years to the ground he stood upon. “This all used to be strawberry fields, they say.”

LaVerne and Barb Swanger of Whittier said they have come to the festival parade for several years.

“I come to see the stars, mostly the soap operas,” said Barb Swanger, standing along the parade route on Euclid Street. “But that one who went by (Kate Linder from “The Young and the Restless”), I don’t watch that program. I watch Channel 7.”

A block north, Karen Ishan and her 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer, sat in front of their condominium complex and jeered as Garden Grove Councilman Frank Kessler drove by in a convertible.

“No oil derricks in Garden Grove!” they yelled, referring to the City Council’s approval of an oil company’s environmental impact report on a proposed drilling project.

Karen Ishan said she has been coming to the Strawberry Festival since before 1969, when she was in the Miss Garden Grove beauty pageant.

“It’s a lot bigger now and a lot more fun,” she said.

The festival, at Village Green Park, at Sanford and Euclid streets, continues from noon to midnight today and 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Monday. The Highland gathering at the county fairgrounds opened at 8 a.m., and soon there were long lines for Scottish meat pies and bangers (that’s sausages to foreigners). The air was filled with the sounds of pipers and drummers warming up. Booths of the various clans stretched off into the distance.

The men sworn to follow Lord Lovat into battle were standing in front of their booth under the banner of the 78th Frasers’ Highlanders, Capistrano Outpost.

“We’re protecting the rear flank,” cracked Capt. L.C. (Doc) Storm of Orange, who with his two comrades were dressed in a blazing array of plaid.

Capt. Carl Clench of Mission Viejo went on explain that the 78th was raised by Lord Lovat in Scotland in 1757 for service in Canada against the French and Indians. There is still a Lord Lovat and still a 78th, which is the largest private army in existence, Clench said.

Clench, a retired aerospace employee, was holding an 18th-Century halberd, a combination ax and spear on a long shaft. His uniform was regulation color for British soldiers of that time: bright, bright red.

“They liked red because it didn’t show blood,” Clench said. “You see your fellow soldiers all covered in blood, it’s demoralizing.”

The gates of the festival had been open 6 hours before the festival’s symbolic opening.

At 1 p.m., crowds poured into the main arena grandstands, and at the shout of “March!” 21 bands of pipers and drummers streamed into the arena behind the American, British and Scottish flags. The crowd cheered, applauded and clapped to the music.

The festival continues in Costa Mesa today from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with demonstrations and competition in dancing and piping, collie sheepherding and sports such as rugby, soccer, the stone put and the caber toss.