Great Ideas for Celebrating Halloween in Style on Your Offshore Yacht

Great Ideas for Celebrating Halloween in Style on Your Offshore Yacht

Let’s face it. Halloween brings out the kid in all of us. And if you’re lucky enough to belong to our exclusive Offshore family, we’ve got some great ideas to help you celebrate and entertain your inner kid this Halloween.

At the dock…

Marinas all over the country host dockside trick-or-treat parties for adults and kids alike. Make your Offshore the go-to favorite treat spot in your marina.

1. Break out the creativity and go big with decorations.

• Look for strings of battery-operated, Halloween-themed LED lights, and string them everywhere to create the right spooky mood. Consider using them to light a path to your door, so the trick-or-treaters know exactly how to get their treats.
• Turn on your outdoor speakers, or invest in an inexpensive Bluetooth setup and broadcast spooky music, demented laughter, and fiendish screams.
• One clever yachtie we know spent a few days constructing giant spiders from foam, pool noodles, and coat hangers, then sprayed them all black and added cheap battery-powered googly eyes she found at the local craft store. Those spiders, some six feet in diameter, crawled up the side of her yacht from the waterline to the flybridge and impressed everyone! Think about making sea monsters, giant squid, or other scary creatures and giving them a dramatic, prominent place to haunt your Offshore.
• Rent a fog machine or use dry ice to create that spooky low-lying ground fog graveyard ambiance at your slip or on the deck.
• Carve jack-o-lanterns (better yet, host a party and carve lots of them!) and place them strategically on the boat and at your slip. Just don’t use traditional candles – strings of battery-powered LED lights or battery-powered candles will work just fine.
• Cover balloons with white shredded plastic garbage bags to make ghosts…or black shredded bags to make dementors…and hang them strategically to catch the wind and reflect the lights.

2. Prepare unique “treats” for kids and adults.

• Now that you’ve made the Offshore a scary setting, bring on the treats. Set up a cooler or treat station with commercial candy (we know, but hey, it’s once a year for cryin’ out loud!) that includes chocolate, gummies, sweet, sour, gruesome, and everything in between. Check your local party store, supermarket, or Amazon to see what’s hot with the younger, candy-eating set.
• For the adults, consider offering a selection of scary hors d’oeuvres or snacks. A quick Google search yields up lots of great suggestions: shortbread cookies shaped as witch fingers, complete with “dirty” fingernails made from an almond slice and melted chocolate; mini-spiderweb pizzas decorated with black olive and pepperoni cut-out shapes; “mummy dogs,” hot dogs or cocktail franks wrapped and baked in strips of crescent roll dough and decorated with mustard-dot “eyes”; pretzel broomsticks, made with pretzel sticks and shredded phyllo dough. The possibilities are endless, and let your inner ghoul shine!
• Depending on where you live, offer a collection of cold – or hot — beverages like cider, punch, spiced tea, wine, and spirits. Country Living offers a staggering collection (no pun intended) of over 45 Halloween-inspired scary cocktails for the adults who come to call. Favorites include Black Magic or Candy Corn Jell-O Shots, Bloody Shirley Temples, or a creepy Eyeball Martini.
• Don’t forget the party accessories – tablecloths, napkins, paper plates and disposable bamboo or other eco-friendly (not plastic) tableware in Halloween themes or colors to match your décor.

3. Get creative with your own costume.

The ocean itself is mysterious and dark. And there are plenty of stories from real life and from literature that can get your creative juices flowing as you think of just the right costumes for yourself and your family.

Think about mutinies, pirates, shipwrecks – both historical and literary. Think about fantasy creatures like kraken, mermaids, and the Loch Ness monster. Think about real sea creatures like sea urchins, sharks, or flying fish.

Think about ships like the Andrea Dorea, the Love Boat,  or the Titanic – or even the Yellow Submarine. Think about lighthouse keepers, tugboat captains, oil rig workers, or deep-sea fishermen. Think about characters from Disney or SpongeBob SquarePants.

There’s plenty of inspiration to help you come up with a unique and memorable nautical costume! Once you’ve settled on a character, browse the internet for inspiration about how to build that costume. Pinterest is a great place to start your search.

Out at anchor…

• Get together with boats from your yacht club or other boating friends, and head out to an anchorage for a private Halloween raft-up, boat-to-boat trick-or-treat party, or beach potluck.
• Head out while there’s still daylight, pick your spot, and do your decorating once you’re secure at anchor.
• Set up a portable projector and screen up on the sun deck, and show old Vincent Price movies, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, or other campy movie favorites like Young Frankenstein or Little Shop of Horrors, or back-to-back episodes of The Walking Dead television series. It’ll keep the kids – both young and old – entertained, especially if there’s plenty of popcorn. If you’d rather keep the popcorn off the deck, dinghy everybody ashore with beach blankets and chairs, and string up a sheet between the trees to function as your outdoor movie screen.
• Get everybody out in their dinghies for cocktail hour and do a raft-up Halloween cocktail hour potluck. Bring your scary hors d’oeuvres, poison apple punch or blood orange margaritas, raft your dinghies together, and watch as the sun goes down and the moon comes up.

Whatever you choose to do this Halloween on your Offshore Yacht, we’d love to see the evidence! Send us photo (or video) documentation of your decorations, your costumes, and your co-celebrants having a blast. It would be helpful if you could tag the photos with your name and your boat name and location, so we can give you proper photo credit on our website.

And if you’d like more ideas about how to enjoy life aboard your Offshore Yacht, we’d love to help you out. Just give us a call or stop by the Newport Beach office to say hello.