Greedy's 30th Birthday Pirate Booze Cruise

Rich Greenfield turns 30 this week so to celebrate he decided to charter a boat around the harbour on Saturday and invite his friends to come along dressed as pirates. Yep - it was to be a fancy dress booze cruise. As is always the way with these things, the costume is genrally left until the last minute. I'd heard rumours about a quality fancy dress shop near my place of work and finally got round to checking it out last week. It did the job.

Claire picked H and I up from Manly and took us back to her place where we got changed. This meant walking through Neutral Bay in full costume as we looked for a taxi. We boarded the boat at Kirribilli, directly opposite Oprah’s House and just down the road from Big John's.

We met the rest of the Manly crew on the boat, as well as the birthday boy himself, and set sail for picks up at Balmain and Darling Harbour. The Japanese tourists loved it when we rocked up to pick up more pirates from the Aquarium jetty. We ooooo'd and aaaar’d our way up and down the river, getting pretty decent reactions from everyone we past. Having a pirate ship interrupt your wedding is surely one of the risks you take if you choose to get married next to the river.

The captain took us quite a way inland before returning to the Harbour where we cruised around, under the bridge and past Oprah. Everyone had a blast and it was a quality day out. The Coopers was flowing and the hosts managed to knock together a fine feed for everyone. I'm not quite sure how a pirate dance-off came about but it was funny to see.

The cruise finished up at 6ish where we all piled into Pier 26, a nice bar on the waterfront in Darling Harbour. Quite how we were all allowed in, in full kit and fully beered up, was beyond any of us and it wasn't long before we were ALL barred from drinking. The party then moved to The Forbes Hotel in the city before H, Will and I had to leave and head off to The Metro to see Gomez with Simo. I was going to go as a pirate but by the evening I was sick of the wig (and everyone else was sick of the chest wig) so I got changed and got into gig mode. It was a top way to finish a brilliant day. Gomez rocked and the venue is probably the best one I have been to. Really small and very loud. Will got so trashed he bought tickets for the gig on the Sunday night as well. So that's three Gomez gigs in 7 days for him. Good work. Oooooo arrrrrrrr.