Photo Gallery—Heavy Traffic On Duval Street

Though the first races of the Race World Offshore-produced Key West Offshore World Championships presented by Performance Boat Center are still two days away, the weeklong event officially kicked off yesterday with what the organizers have long-dubbed the “world’s fastest parade of boats.” The description works well enough for the average fan in the street, but as a self-confessed language geek it’s always bugged me.

No couple shows up more positively for the annual parade than Brit and Amanda Lilly of the Dirty Money and XINSURANCE racing teams. Photos by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

How can a three-mile-ish-long parade of anything that takes the better part of two hours be considered speedy, much less “fastest?”

Here’s the grammatical problem you probably couldn’t care less about, but one that makes this writer-dork crazy: “Fastest” is the adjective that modifies “parade.” But the parade from the Race Village pits at the Truman Waterfront and down Duval Street is anything but fast. This year, the procession took the better of two hours. Nothing is particularly fast about taking that amount of time to cover such a short distance.

The 2024 Key West Worlds have officially begun.

Here’s what it should be called: “The world’s largest parade of fast boats.”

But kidding and word-play aside, this year’s parade attracted most of the 72 teams in town for the Key West happening. Ryan Beckley, who is racing in the Bracket 500 class this week, grew up in Key West. He’s seen and been part of a few raceboat parades. And he was impressed with the turnout.

“It was probably the most amount of people I have ever seen on the route from end to end,” he said. “It was really fun.”

The Key West Worlds are on and yesterday’s raceboat parade—by any name—kicked them off in style.