MISQUAH — For as long as anyone can document, the Fourth of July on Big Pelican has ended with boats — pontoons, fishing rigs, the occasional defiant canoe — drifting out from the landings at dusk in a loose, leaderless procession that formed when people felt like forming it and dissolved when their coolers ran dry. On Saturday, for the first time, that procession had a name, a route, a start time, and a grand marshal, and the town is still deciding how it feels about that.

The first official Misquah Fourth of July Boat Parade launched from the Loon Lake public landing at noon, twenty-four boats strong — of the twenty-six registered, one pontoon lost its battery at the landing and one captain, by his own cheerful admission, overslept — and made a slow no-wake lap of Big Pelican before the evening’s fireworks — a far more orderly affair than the “willy-nilly conga line,” as one longtime participant fondly called its predecessor, that the town has staged by happy accident every summer for decades.

The formalization was the work of a committee convened last December in the First Lutheran basement, and it arrived with the full apparatus of formality: a lineup time (11:30), a designated lead boat, a no-wake rule enforced more by the loons than by anyone official, and — the detail that generated the most basement debate — a grand marshal, a role filled this year by Alderman Lloyd Bunde, the town’s recognized authority on the proper way to wave from a boat.

Bunde took the duty seriously, leading the lap at a dignified idle and waving, by his own count, “correctly, the entire way, which is more than I can say for the boat behind me.” He declined to judge the decorated entries, the committee having decided early that judging “leads to feelings,” but allowed himself one observation: that the parade “held together better than the conga line ever did, and lost something in the trade, and both of those things are true, and that’s the Fourth for you.”

Not everyone mourned the conga line. “The old way, you’d have a pontoon going one direction and a fishing boat going the other and somebody’s nephew on a tube in the middle of it,” said Renée Fontaine of Loon Ridge, which hosted the launch. “This was nicer. Nobody got swamped. The loons kept their chicks.” The two chicks now on the north end (see Outdoors) rode out their first Fourth without incident, which the no-wake rule was half designed to ensure.

Others felt the loss more keenly. “A parade you sign up for is a different animal than a parade you just end up in,” said Deb Pavek of the Northern Tap, who has ended up in roughly thirty of them. “The whole point of the old one was that nobody organized it. It just happened, like weather. Now it’s an event. I’m not against it. I’m just saying we should be honest that we traded something for it.”

The committee has pronounced the inaugural parade a success and intends to make it annual, with refinements. Whether the spontaneous version survives alongside the official one — whether boats will still drift out on ordinary summer evenings, ungoverned and unjudged — remains, like most things on the Chain, up to the boats. The Editorial Board offers its own view elsewhere in this edition.