The Ducks Have Right of Way

This is a Tuesday. Every Tuesday from May to September a few dozen boats turn up on Lake Union for the Duck Dodge, which has been running since 1974 and is less a regatta than a standing appointment. Crews sit on the rail, somebody is usually in costume, and there is a weekly theme with a Black Duck awarded to whoever commits hardest to it.

The name comes from the city saying no. When Ron Lloyd, Mike Rice and Bruce Gilbert asked permission in 1974 to hold a casual Tuesday evening race, Seattle turned them down on the grounds that the boats might bother the waterfowl. So the rule became that you dodge the ducks, the ducks have right of way, and the objection got written into the name and kept there for fifty years.

Lake Union has an older name too. In Chinook Jargon it is Tenas Chuck, little water, which is a better description than Union of what this actually is: a small lake with a working city crowded right up to the edge of it. You can see the whole argument in one frame. Masts in front, marinas behind them, then the towers, then the cranes putting up more towers.

The north shore is where you watch this from. People walk down the hill on a Tuesday evening, find a spot at the end of the park, and wait for the fleet to come round the mark. That audience is the reason this sits in Wallingford rather than out on the open water where the boats actually are.

The fleet is the subject here and the skyline is only behind it. Photographs of this view usually get made the other way round.