This weekend is Gasparilla and you’ll hear a strange new dialect around Tampa Bay. You might want to bone up on your “Pirate.” Click here for a short, funny and informative lesson on talking Pirate in 2017. You won’t be sad that you clicked. And here’s another one from the Pirate Guys! Too funny!
“The Gasparilla Pirate Festival is a large parade and a host of related community events celebrated almost every year since 1904 in Tampa, Florida. It is held in late January and hosted by Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla and the City of Tampa, and it celebrates the apocryphal legend of José Gaspar (also known as Gasparilla), a mythical Spanish pirate who supposedly operated in Southwest Florida in the early 1800s.
The theme and focal point of Gasparilla is a friendly “invasion” by mythical pirate José Gaspar and his crew. On the day of the Gasparilla Parade of Pirates, members of Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla (YMKG), accompanied by a flotilla of hundreds of smaller boats, sail across Tampa Bay to downtown Tampa on the Jose Gasparilla, a 165′ long “pirate” ship which was specially built for this purpose in 1954.[4] Once the ship lands, the pirate captain demands that the mayor hand over the key to the city in a playful ceremony which has had different outcomes in different years.[5] Whether or not the mayor actually “surrenders”, the pirates hold their “victory parade” through the streets of Tampa.”…more from Wikipedia
