Celebration of Light Fireworks Festival

English Bay is the launch pad for the Celebration of Light Fireworks Festival that happens every year in Vancouver (pronounced “Vancoover”) during the summer.

Countries send their representative fireworks teams and what happens is everybody is sitting on all the beaches around English Bay, Kitsilano and over on the North Shore in North and West Vancouver.

The city then closes off the streets around English Bay probably about six streets from the beach up around 7 PM and everybody starts walking down to the beach.

Hours before that though people start heading down to the beach to stake out their fireworks festival spots with a packed meal because it will be almost four hours yet before the fireworks start.

The way the competition works is that they have music that’s put out over the water from coordinated loud speaker systems and the breeze carries the sounds across the water.

It’s usually classical music that is also simulcast over a few local radio stations and the fireworks are synchronized to that music. the competitor who does the best job of presenting the performance in time with the music wins. But then again I think we all win with our own version of the Northern Lights dancing for us on a warm summer night!

There’ll be at least 20 or 30 thousand people on the beaches and we’ll even have people with their boats out in the harbour in the middle channel and you’ll even see people on charter boats and sea kayaks that they rent at Granville Island just to see the fireworks festival. They paddle right out there onto the water and I don’t believe that they’ve ever had a big accident or anything like that it’s always been good.

You might be sitting a beach around Vancouver or you maybe watching from the roof-top of an apartment of which that whole area around Denman is pretty much apartments but when the wind starts to carry the music over the water and the fireworks show starts synchronized with the music its really something to behold.

The actual fireworks festival usually start around 10:00 and goes on for about 45 minutes.

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