Cape Coral residents work to bring joy of Boat-A-Long despite bad weather

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FILE – Cape Coral Holiday Boat-A-Long (WINK News)

A push to bring back a holiday favorite. Lots of you look forward to the Annual Cape Coral Holiday Boat-A-Long.

Boaters go all out with lights and decorations. But this year, it got canceled because of the weekend rain and wind.

The city never rescheduled, but one man’s not letting that crush his Christmas spirit.

Tony Salerno of Cape Coral is ready to do whatever it takes to spread Christmas cheer the way he knows best.

He’s participated with his boats decked to the hulls every year since the start and he won’t let a little rain cancel his parade.

Watching the Boat-A-Long has become a tradition for Pat and Alan Wilcox.

“We’ve always had a chance to see it because somebody had a house near the canal where we could watch it or we would just watch it right here,” Alan said.

The couple moved here in 1978 and over the years, they’ve brought friends and family to Four Freedoms Park to soak in the Christmas joy.

“They seem to have a spirit of goodwill and people just trying to remind people of the meaning of Christmas,” Alan said.

This year, they planned to watch the boats with their grandkids, but due to the rain and high winds, the city had to cancel the event.

“The weather was so bad…I felt bad because it’s just tradition here; it’s like the Edison Festival of Lights,” Pat said.

Now the talk of the town is if the city will host the boat parade this coming weekend or on New Year’s.

However, the city says they won’t reschedule. But that isn’t stopping some of the boaters who decorated for the parade from getting together.

Salerno put up a Facebook post calling upon his fellow boaters to keep the tradition alive by running the parade route on Saturday.

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