by Bob Groeneveld/Special to the Langley Advance
The Dutchman has once again foundered in Yorkson, and pirates are escaping like rats from a sinking ship… just in time for Halloween.
The pirate ship has returned to Derek Condon’s front yard after a year’s absence that was given over to a circus big top replete with clowns instead.
“The boat is looking good right now,” said Condon late last week. “It’s up and running and a lot of the props are going. I’ve had 300 people here today already. They say, ‘What? Not finished? It looks finished!”
He expected the remainder of his fantastical Halloween display to be complete this week.
Last year’s clown theme gave Condon and his neighbours a break from the pirates.
He thought it might be less work for him (it wasn’t, really), and that it might drive less traffic past his home, disturbing his neighbours.
Or so he thought, since thousands of people come to enjoy his pirates every year.
It turned out, however, that neighbours he rarely saw throughout the year enjoyed those pirates, too.
“We took last year off and didn’t build a boat, thinking we’d give a break to the close-by neighbours that we never hear from,” said Condon. “We didn’t put the boat up last year, and the only people who complained to us were those neighbours we never see.”
He kept hearing the same question: “Where’s the boat?”
“Well, we thought this was a hindrance for you,” Condon would reply, explaining, “We have huge amounts of traffic in October going by this area and stopping in your driveways.”
All those neighbours surprised him: “They said they love the boat.”
So they’ve got their boat back this year.
It’s a big job. He does most of the work himself, with help from his two now-grown sons, building a sinking ship practically from scratch each year, populating it with all manner of pirates and assorted nasty characters.
“We’ve always had Davy Jones on the boat,” he said, “but we’re not sure if the squid-faced guy is going to make an appearance this year or not, but there are more or less a whole bunch of pirates scattered around the yard.”
Some characters are made of “pool noodles.”
“I dress them up, put masks on them and stuff like that,” said Condon, “and we have a whole bunch of skeletons that we’ve stressed up a little bit with melted plastic to make the look a little old, and there’s some Halloween-bought ones, as well as pirates. But everything else we made from scratch.”
And then there’s all the lighting effects, and “the waterfalls and smoke and stuff.”
The “stuff” includes things like a motorized skeleton pirate that’s busily digging a hole through the Halloween season.
It’s nearly all built out of recycled materials, provided with help from friends and neighbours.
A lot of the cedar for the outside of the boat was donated by “a client who had it lying in an old barn.”
“The ropes were donated from the Vancouver School Board, and I take used box springs from a mattress recycling place on Annacis Island and rip them apart for boards,” Condon said. “I rip pallets apart to make things.”
His cannons come from construction sites. They’re leftover cardboard tubes used to pour concrete footings. The ship’s masts are made from swimming pools: the rollers used to roll up pool covers.
Styrofoam is supplied by a roofing company that gets it from commercial job sites.
“I try to recycle almost everything I use,” said Condon.
Before the pirates there were zombies and a graveyard in the front yard… that sort of thing.
It really started when he first moved into the Yorkson area of Willoughby 11 years ago.
“We were here in the first stage of this area of Yorkson,” Condon explained.” There were lots of nice houses, but there was absolutely nothing for the kids to do outside. None of the parks were built, the three elementary schools that are close by now didn’t exist, and we just didn’t see what we moved into the area for: a community [atmosphere] of people coming outside and getting to know each other and doing stuff for the kids.”
And it wasn’t just the kids that got him going.
“I mean, we all know how bad crime is around these areas,” said. “Well, if more people got outside and knew what their neighbours looked like, it kind of changes things.”
He wanted to help create some of that community atmosphere, to change things.
Mission accomplished. The atmosphere has grown.
“I have people who live up to four or five blocks away,” Condon said. “Every day they drag their parents out for a walk, to see what new has been added.”
As an accountant, Condon likes the physical labour his project requires. “It gets me out and doing things at this time of year,” he said. “It’s actually a very busy time of year for me, a lot of corporate year-end stuff. I have to give myself a little bit of exercise before I hunker down all the way to May.”
He doesn’t do it for the charitable donations that many visitors want to make.
There’s a donation box for people who insist, and in 2015 the pirate ship brought in $15,000 in donations for Canuck Place.
“But we don’t want to make this a job,” Condon cautioned. “We do want people to donate, and we’ll donate every single penny we collect. We just haven’t been wanting to push it really heavy. I don’t want that to be a big deal. We put a donation box out, but believe me, I’m not doing it for money.”
The Dutchman has run aground and will be spilling out its crew of pirates through Halloween at 8393 209A St., near the 208th overpass.
