Delegates Eligible: 32

Every week more delegates become eligible to compete at state. The season started with qualifiers from the past year. All of each pageants top15 qualify along with Miss Amity & Miss Photogenic. Each preliminary pageant qualifies delegates as “at large” status with their finalist, amity, photogenic and peoples choice awards. Next Pageant January 15 – Miss Polk County USA & Miss Polk County Teen USA.

THE 2005 WINTERFEST BOAT PARADE

Regality Check

Bangor Daily News

One of the most anticipated appearances of the year is The Winterfest Boat Parade in Broward County. This is the largest boat parade in the world and is a holiday tradition in South Florida. This year both our Miss Florida USA Melissa Witek and Miss Florida Teen USA Victoria Ratliff were both on the same boat, The Publix/Perrier Entry. This made for plenty of photo opportunities as our ladies greeted over 850,000 fans as the Intracoastal Waterway’s were packed on the beautiful fall evening.

The day began poolside at the host hotel, The Marriot Harbourside in Ft. Lauderdale with our ladies before the WSVN-FOX television cameras. Both Melissa and Victoria were featured in the pretape segments for the international broadcast. The producers were very impressed at the on camera abilities of both Melissa and Victoria. This confirms what I have always known that these are two talented young ladies! The parade will air this Christmas on WSVN-Channel 7 in Miami as well as 15 countries in South America and The Caribbean. It will also repeat on New Years Day.

Shaq's boat
The Winterfest Boat parade heads up the Intracoastal Waterway for the 33rd straight year. This is Fort Lauderdale's premiere holiday event, with more than a 100 decorated boats and yatchs ringing in the holiday season. This year's boat parade's grand marshal Miami Heat superstar Shaquille O'Neal was on this boat.
(Sun-Sentinel/Michael Francis McElroy)

Then it was time for our ladies to be chauffered to the yacht. Melissa, Victoria, Mary Lou Gravitt and Victoria’s Mom Vicki were all onboard as it was time to sail! A beautiful night awaited as temperatures were 70 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. One-hundred boats this year were fully decorated for the ten mile trek up the intracoastal! So many beautiful homes and sites made this one picturesque parade route. All of them packed with house parties that greeted our titleholders. A full night of waving and laughing were in store for Melissa and Victoria as it was all captured on print. Enjoy the pictures!

House of lights:

Dr. William Zenga's home in Fort Lauderdale was one of the

winners of the best-decorated contest

for the Winterfest Boat Parade.
(Photo courtesy of Don Seidsman)

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Before the parade
Boats gather at Port Everglades before the parade begins.
(Sun-Sentinel/Michael Francis McElroy)

Thousands of fans revel in

Winterfest Boat Parade tradition

By Rafael A. Olmeda

Staff Writer Sun Sentinel

Posted December 19 2004

When the fireworks burst over the 17th Street Causeway Bridge early Saturday night, signaling the start of the Seminole Hard Rock Winterfest Boat Parade, Bonnie Everhart hunched her shoulders and smiled. "I've never seen fireworks from this close before," she said. Thousands of spectators crammed the shores along the Intracoastal Waterway to catch the Fort Lauderdale holiday season tradition, which featured 100 decorated vessels on a 10-mile jaunt from Port Everglades to Lake Santa Barbara.

Tourists, snowbirds, and full-time residents gathered on bridges and in parks, restaurants, hotels and condominiums to delight in the decorations, music and near perfect South Florida weather.
Everhart, 61, had seen it all before, but never from the perch she found Saturday, on the bridge west of the opening.

Sitting in the motorized scooter wheelchair she nicknamed Zephyr, the wide-eyed Everhart said the annual parade is one of the reasons she's a proud snowbird. "I think it's tops," she said. "It's so perfect for Fort Lauderdale." Her favorite entry in the boat parade came early, as the Swap Shop Circus barge passed underneath, with the Flying Wallendas acrobatic team stunning the crowd by performing balancing feats that would even challenge the nerves of an indoor crowd.
She also waved at Miami Heat player Shaquille O'Neal, the parade's grand marshal, who stood on the deck of the Lady Windridge.

Hard Rock Casino Boat Prepares

The Hard Rock Casino Boat moves down the

Intracoastal Waterway for the 33rd straight year.

(Sun-Sentinel/Michael Francis McElroy)

Dancers on the Pollo Tropical yacht, styled after the Puerto Rican fort El Morro, also impressed her, almost as much as the two men on the deck who appeared to shoot at each other before getting into a vigorous fencing match.

Every year the parade proves that the Christmas season is different in Fort Lauderdale than in other parts of the country. The parade's theme, "Rock and Roll FantaSea," featured a musical score heavy on pop music, but the Christmas carols still snuck in on boats that insisted on them. After the Comcast yacht blared Glenn Frey's 1980s hit The Heat is On, the Lady Lucille followed it up with Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

Everhart loved every minute of it. "I used to watch from the water, from my father's boat," she said. Over the past decade, she's gone to restaurants or hotels, looking for the best view. Sometimes she just waited for the parade to be broadcast on television. "I never thought of coming up on the bridge," she said. Next year, she expects to do it again.