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Wrightsville Beach
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Dancing through the Flotilla on the Jacatash

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For about an hour last Saturday night, the heart of the old Lumina Pavilion was reborn on the Wrightsville Beach waterways for the 32nd Annual North Carolina Holiday Flotilla boat parade.

The classic dance hall was recreated on a boat that was built one year before Lumina was bulldozed when Wilmington boat owner Abram Lambertson entered his 1972 Hatteras motor yacht with the classic Lumina as its theme.

Lambertson’s boat, the Jacatash, was boat No. 6 in this year’s parade. Friends and relatives spent three days assembling the boat’s decorative theme, with a plywood dance floor on the yacht’s bow, strings of lights overhanging the dance floor from the bridge, and colored Christmas lights strung along the boat’s railings.

Bringing it all together was the lighted Lumina sign above the boat’s bridge, looking much like the sign that identified the pavilion and could be seen from ships miles offshore from 1905 – 1973. And, of course, the project wasn’t complete without the music, which was projected from giant speakers pointing outward toward the crowds watching the flotilla.

Lambertson meticulously programmed a series of songs to flash in beat with the lights. This year’s tunes included several Christmas songs with a swing-dance vibe, to give off the Lumina feel.

“Programming the lights can be the most time-consuming part,” he said. “You have to listen to each song over and over and time the beats into it.”

Each of Lambertson’s four flotilla entries have paired music and lights, but the theme has changed for each year. In 2010, the theme was a rock band, and the boat featured silhouettes of musicians on its side.

But this year’s theme was partly inspired by a prior entry into the flotilla.

“One year there was a boat decorated like trolley No. 9 and we decided we should do something that reflected Wrightsville Beach’s history,” said Carolina Priester, Lambertson’s wife. “Since one of our songs was a swing dance song, we thought a theme based on the Lumina would be great.”

To keep with the theme of the boat, friends Meredith Sullivan and Melissa Insco joined Priester on the front and danced to the songs. They never missed a beat.

While Lambertson steered the boat through the waterway traffic that lined the boat’s route, Insco said she got a great sense of the crowds and the atmosphere from the boat’s bow, and it wasn’t just the view.

“When you’re dancing on the front the boat, you get some good whiffs of the restaurants as we pass by,” Insco said.

Lambertson said this year’s crowds for the flotilla were some of the largest he has ever seen, from the traffic on the water to the throngs of people lining the Causeway Bridge. He said the mild weather was probably one of the draws for this year’s flotilla.

“Normally, we’d be frozen by the end of the day,” he said.

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