Winning parade with fire on water

Every year after the Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade, Randy Ressel and his wife, Debra Huse, tell themselves that this was their last year participating.

It takes so much time and effort, they said, and after it’s all done, you just want to breathe and relax.

And every year, as the next parade appears on the horizon, their irrepressible enthusiasm for the holidays picks up steam. Soon, it’s like a speeding locomotive, and they probably couldn’t stop themselves even if they wanted to.

“As time goes on, you get all excited about it,” Huse said.

That excitement paid off again for Ressel and Huse this year, when their friends, the Ayloush family in Newport Beach, let their yacht, the 54-foot Finesse, be the pair’s canvas for another award-winning Christmas boat in the parade.

The pair have their own boat, but said they needed a “bigger stage” for their light-show-on-water. With plenty of local volunteers, including the Ayloushes, the White and Gowans families and their friend Jerry Lester, they gathered their resources to create a winner.

Ressel said they dug through 10 years of Christmas music to see what they should blast from their professional-quality sound system, and rummaged through materials from years past to match this year’s Joys of Christmas Toys theme.

Like a lightbulb brightening above her head, Huse said it struck her that the train they wanted to include in the display could be the toy itself, Thomas the Tank Engine.

“The pressure was off, so I just enjoyed it,” Ressel said.

Considering that Finesse was named this year’s Sweepstakes winner — the event’s top honor — it would appear that everyone else enjoyed it, too.

“Of course, after all that work, I’d love to win something. We were seeing two of the other big boats and thought ‘Oh my God, how can I ever beat that boat?’” Huse said, laughing.

All it took was a 60-foot train with flames bursting 10 feet in the air, elves, a 30,000 watt sound system and 250 hours to put it altogether.

“You should see the kids’ eyes light up. It’s really exciting to do that. The fire on the water part just really blows people away,” Huse said.