The last couple years my Independence Day celebrations had been rather meager, this year was a definite improvement. Several years back I had gone with my aunt and uncle to an island where friends and relatives lived for big parties, and this year I finally got a chance to go again. The island has about 70,000 people living on it, so itÔø‡s no little rock in the water with a shack on it. The island puts on a show July 3rd to allow residents to watch a larger show while doing their own thing the night of the 4th. We missed the ferry we wanted to catch, so we go to the island just in time to catch the finale of the show, which was fairly good for a community of that size. It ended with a number of aerial salutes, a barrage of medium sized color shells and then a couple large willow shells. I didnÔø‡t get a chance to try and take pictures or video because we saw the show was ending and just pulled over into a parking lot to watchÔø‡

That night I set off a few small things before going to sleep. First was a 35mm film container filled with the contents of a shell I had disassembled to make it into an aerial flash salute, it was lit and thrown into the water. To see a burst of green stars come from and reflect off the water looks very cool, but you have to be careful throwing things like that because itÔø‡s technically a no-noÔø‡ Other than that I did a couple flash salutes and some small Class C stuff. My supply of homemade items was rather limited at this point, I didnÔø‡t have a lot of time to prepare and had only flash salutes and some supplies for gas fireballs. The house we were staying in was right on the beach, in a large Ôø‡CÔø‡ shaped cove, which allowed us to see fireworks going off all along the beach the next night.

The day of the 4th started out slowly as usual, as we all looked for ways to pass the time until it got dark. Bottle rockets and individual firecrackers are always a good way to pass time, so we spent a while just shooting rockets then set off a couple flash salutes. At this point we decided to try something a little different, so I got a medium sized rocket, removed the nosecone and taped a 4g flash salute onto the end, the fuse to the salute was in the payload section so when the stars and powder of the rocket went it would light the fuse to the salute. This rocket was then taken to the very edge of the water and launched. It didnÔø‡t look very airworthy, and sure enough it wasnÔø‡t. The rocket, which would normally go maybe a hundred feet, got about four feet off the ground, nosed over, and landed in the water about thirty feet offshore, exploding only about twenty feet from a rowboat (Luckily there were no people in it! If there were we would not have launched the rocket of course). After that we went to some other peopleÔø‡s house on the other side of the island and pretty much just sat around for a while. We set off a couple more salutes because we didnÔø‡t have anything better to do and one of the people there had some rather old homemade ones as well. We tried to light one but the fuse was in bad shape and wouldnÔø‡t burn so we just cut off the burnt part and saved the salute to take apart. When we got back to our own place we took it apart and poured the powder into another rocket, this one actually worked because it didnÔø‡t add much weight or change the shape, I will probably fill a bunch of rockets with flash next year.

Passing the time with bottle rockets:

Testing if the camera will get a decent picture of a sparkler. Verdict: Yes!

When we got back we went over to the house where the party was at and enjoyed the food. There were fewer people with fireworks than previous years IÔø‡d been there, but still a pretty good amount of stuff. One particularly luck/rich/spoiled kid had at least eight very large cakes, including one pretty cool one that was angled to shoot out a fan of charcoal stars along with shells. All of them were decent, but I doubt any were worth what they probably paid. They also had some very good larger commercial rockets with surprisingly loud reports at the end, but I didnÔø‡t get the name on them.

A rather crappy picture of some of the larger cakes, I didn't have the time or space to arrange them nice for a picture:

Most of the people where we were just had cakes, there were few shells being set off in our spot on the beach. We werenÔø‡t alone on the there however, and for several miles we could see fireworks going off all down the beach. We could see people setting off cakes, rockets and shells everywhere, creating a panorama of fireworks. Some people even had larger shells, perhaps as large as six inches, which were very impressive. Further down the beach we could see a professionally done show that went for quite some time, but we were too far away to really enjoy it. We finished up with a 35g flash salute and a gas fireball. The fuel used for the fireball was some weird oil stuff because we didnÔø‡t have anything else, and it didnÔø‡t work very well. Not only that, but we used too much gas (we put too little in an earlier test and over-compensated this time) so burning gas landed back on the ground. It was still a pretty good fireball, but next year weÔø‡ll do a better job. We used up the remainder of our flash salutes blowing apart used cakes and headed back to our place.

Some random stuff going off:

Gas fireball ready to be buried and lit:

Gas fireball video frames:

Assorted cakes and shells:

More cakes and shells:

This year was pretty good (especially compared to last year) but next year should be even better. IÔø‡m finally starting to make real fireworks, so along with the larger quantities of flash salutes IÔø‡ve become well known for over there IÔø‡ll also have larger starmines and hopefully some shells as well. As usual, the 4th for me is just a warm-up for my own party where I use most of my fireworks, so I still had a lot to look forward to.