Boat parties

If you’re not hip to boat parties, you’re all wet.
Die-hard party people and Chicago club promoters move to offshore shindigs on Lake Michigan as early as June, but it’s the August 1 Chicago Scene Boat Party (noon–6pm, north of the water filtration plant near Chicago Avenue) that’s become the mother of all booze and bikini blowouts since its 2001 debut. The now-annual gathering has all the skin of a Girls Gone Wild video and the class of a grown-up Mardi Gras outing, plus a dose of the slapstick hilarity from Caddyshack’s yacht-club scene. Several hundred boats are expected to line up this year—more than a few laden with a ratio of four babes to every male captain with a midlife crisis—and many will be outfitted with their own house DJs and sound systems. Things get wetter and wilder than they do on land with the help of inflatable rafts and floating trampolines, but the Coast Guard and police keep proceedings from sinking into insanity by maintaining a “safe zone” where every boat can be boarded for inspection. There’s no ticket to get in, but you’ve got to show up on a waterborne craft: boat, yacht, Jet Ski or canoe.