The Indiantown Marina Party Posse

“Moose balls!” kind of sounds like a mild expletive. Like something you would say if you broke a nail, spilled a glass of milk, or missed your exit ramp. I could say sailors use mild expletives like this all the time, but that is a lie, any expletive a sailor would use would be much larger than a moose ball.

Moose balls are actually something wonderful that developed during our time at Indiantown Marina. It started at one of the holiday parties the marina threw for all the cruisers, when a few of us were planning a Women Who Sail Facebook group get-together for the day after Thanksgiving. I volunteered to make margaritas. Tina wanted to make Jello shooters. I told her, being a vegetarian, that I didn’t eat gelatin, but not to worry about me. Except this is before I knew Tina that well and hadn’t realized that she leaves no partier behind – and that she loves a challenge. And rise to the challenge she did, showing up with chocolatey Baileys pudding shooters. They were amazing. A couple small dinner parties later Tina added a new ingredient to her shooter recipe – Cool Whip***. And just when no one thought Tina or her shooters couldn’t be any cooler, Tina’s shooters were transformed into a solid ice-creamy chocolatey alcoholic treat that begged to be named. So eventually, it only seemed fitting, these wonderful orbs of chocolate brown delight invented by a Canadian, came to be know as Moose Balls.

Moose Balls are actually kind of a metaphor for our social life at Indiantown – you know, how friendships develop and grow and turn into to something so good, you have to name them — like, say, The Indiantown Party Posse. The Indiantown Party Posse was/is actually a Facebook Messenger Group started to help plan the Women Who Sail meet up. The group quickly became a vehicle for planning small dinner parties and getting together for Taco Tuesday night at JR’s, a local bar and restaurant, to full blown parties and contests involving the whole marina. As it evolved this party planning turned into a fluid, free association bit of creativity, developing events on the fly from as little as a posted picture of a fish stew, which became a low country boil night, or a bad night at Taco Tuesday (not at JR’s), which became a fish taco night. I heard the Posse recently held a Spamageddon, a canned meat party and cook off (no doubt inspired by/in honor of the departure of the vegetarians from the Posse).

The best inspiration (in my opinion) the Posse conjured up during our time at the marina came from a conversation at a dinner party about seeing each other’s boats and discussion about what to do on New Years Eve. And The Indiantown Marina Party Posse Boat Crawl was born.

It was a progressive dinner (actually a progressive snack and drink), boat to boat from the storage yard to the docks in the marina. We toured 5 boats and one trailer, hung out with some of the best people in Indiantown, drank Baileys and coffee, Bloody Marys, Moscow Mules, Sangria, Champagne, and hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, we ate pastries, fruit, egg bakes, garlic bread, stuffed mushrooms, chips and dip, antipasti, and nachos. And at the very end of it all, we danced and sang and downed a few cold creamy, chocolatey, friendship bonding shooters. Moose balls!

* All pics are click to enlarge.

*** Note – this blog entry has been altered to correct my mistake (not sure why my proof reader didn’t catch it) of mislabeling Cool Whip as Miracle Whip.