Walk down to the water in Charter Landing most Saturdays in October and you'll see the usual: a pontoon idling past, somebody hosing off a boat lift, maybe a kid casting for bream off the end of a pier. On October 3, that same stretch of shoreline turns into a parade route.
Boo Bash on Logan Martin runs from 1 to 4 p.m. that day, and it works exactly the way it sounds: boats loaded with costumed kids cruise from dock to dock, and homeowners who've decorated their piers hand out candy as the flotilla passes. What started as an idea on a pontoon boat in 2022 has become the single biggest recurring gathering on this lake's fall calendar, and Charter Landing sits right on the water it happens on. This isn't background noise for residents here. It's an event where your own dock is the venue, not the destination.
The pontoon conversation that became the lake's biggest party
The origin story is almost too casual to believe. Organizer Kelli Lasseter has said the whole thing started with a summer conversation about how fun a pier-to-pier trick-or-treat might be, since water levels were running higher that year. She posted the idea on Facebook the next morning. That was it.
The first year, in 2022, drew about 140 trick-or-treaters and their families, and it rained. By last year, that number had climbed to roughly 2,300. That's not gradual growth. That's a lake tradition that found its footing almost immediately and then kept compounding.
The 2023 event gives a clearer sense of what that scale actually means on the ground. That year, 106 piers were decorated along the route, and 125 volunteers logged at least 40 hours each pulling it together, an estimated $160,000 in donated labor. Families who dressed up their docks spent an average of $200 each on candy, costumes, and decorations, which organizers pegged as roughly a $21,200 direct boost to the local economy in a single afternoon. For a neighborhood like Charter Landing, that's not an abstract economic-impact number from a press release. That's your neighbor's pier, your neighbor's cooler of candy, your neighbor's speaker system, all adding up across a few hundred yards of shoreline.
As the event has grown, Lasseter has been clear that the goal isn't to turn it into a spectacle for spectacle's sake. She's described it as a chance to have fun with the lake community and enjoy what amounts to a last hurrah for the lake season before the boats get winterized and the docks go quiet.
That framing matters if you live in Charter Landing. This is the one weekend when the entire working rhythm of the lake, the boat traffic, the noise, the neighbors you wave to but rarely talk to, gets pointed at something purely social. It's the lake's version of a block party, except the block is water and the porches are piers.
What's actually happening on the route this year
A few specifics are new or worth knowing if you're planning to decorate or just watch the parade go by:
- Piers get assigned a number at registration this year, which judges use to record their evaluations for the decorating contest. First, second, and third place trophies go out for both pier decorating and costumes, and Bikini Buddies owner Angie Henson is donating the trophies.
- In recent years, the water route has been paired with a land-based stop at Lakeside Park, organized by Pell City Parks and Recreation, with carnival games, photo booths, food trucks, and giveaways for anyone who wants to stretch their legs mid-event rather than stay on the boat the entire four hours.
- After the water route wraps, this year's after-party moves to Tiki Hut, which normally closes for the season right after Labor Day but is reopening just for Boo Bash with a live band and a 28-foot pumpkin set up for photos. Tiki Hut manager Michael Emerick has said families often show up still in costume and end up swimming or hanging around the play area once the kids shed their outfits.
None of this requires a boat if you'd rather watch from your own dock, but if Charter Landing is on this year's route, expect boat traffic to pick up noticeably during that four-hour window, and expect it to slow again once the flotilla passes.
The dollar that funds the buoy under your own hull
Here's the part of Boo Bash that has nothing to do with candy and everything to do with why it matters if you keep a boat at your own dock in Charter Landing.
Since 2024, Boo Bash has partnered with the Logan Martin Lake Protection Association, the nonprofit responsible for installing and maintaining the lighted buoys that mark shallow water, sandbars, and submerged hazards across the lake. The partnership, sometimes called Boo Bash for BOO-ees, funnels a share of the event's proceeds directly into that buoy program. Ahead of the 2025 event, organizers said the partnership had already generated more than $14,000, enough to fund a stated goal of ten new hazard buoys that year. Last year's event handed LMLPA a check for $12,000.
This past July, LMLPA installed its 100th lighted buoy since the program launched in 2019, a milestone the association marked directly on the buoy itself. That's a real number worth sitting with if you boat on Logan Martin regularly: a hundred lighted markers now sit on the water specifically because a Halloween party kept raising money for them.
Former LMLPA president Bud Kitchin has explained why that fundraising has to keep happening every year rather than being a one-time project. The buoys don't last as long as the association originally assumed. "The lifespan of a buoy is not five years like we originally thought," Kitchin has said. "It's more like two to three years." Every summer, LMLPA also has to replace two or three buoys that get hit or vandalized outright. There's no version of this where the fundraising stops.
That's the piece of the puzzle a lot of residents miss. The dock you decorate for a few hours in October is quietly subsidizing the safety infrastructure you rely on every time you take a pontoon out after dark for the rest of the year. It's not charity in the abstract sense. It's the actual buoy near the actual sandbar you've probably run close to at some point without realizing it was there.
What this means if you're on the route
If Charter Landing is part of this year's path, the practical version of all this is simple. Register your pier early if you want a number for the judging. Plan for boat traffic between 1 and 4 p.m. on October 3. If you've got young kids and want the land-based option, Lakeside Park will have the carnival games and food trucks without requiring a boat ride. And if you're the type who likes knowing where the money goes, know that whatever gets raised this year is headed toward replacing buoys that, by LMLPA's own accounting, wear out faster than anyone expected.
Boo Bash didn't get big because someone planned it that way. It got big because a lake full of people who mostly wave at each other from their boats found one afternoon a year where they'd rather stop and talk. For a neighborhood like Charter Landing, built dock by dock along that same water, that's not a footnote. That's the whole reason the shoreline feels like a community rather than just a row of addresses.
If you've been thinking about what a home on this stretch of Logan Martin is actually worth heading into the fall market, or you're weighing options up and down the lake, Billy Brodie offers a free, no-obligation home valuation for Charter Landing and the surrounding Logan Martin communities. Reach out anytime to talk through what your dock, your view, and this stretch of shoreline are worth right now.
