From Sarah Hoye:

Steve Malla couldn’t afford to rent a float for the parade so he did the next best thing — he made his own. 

Malla and a group of friends got busy Friday evening and built a float using supplies from around his house and an abandoned grocery cart and became the “Krunk Krewe.”

“I tried to get in the parade but I didn’t have enough money,” says Malla, 27, of Seminole. “So, I thought we’d have our own float and have our own parade.”

The “krewe” members have been friends since high school and attended Gasparilla festivities together for years.

The homemade float, a cardboard covered grocery cart complete with cannons flowing with beer, flags and sails, took about five hours to make and 30 minutes to reassemble at the parade route.

They were walking it down the pedestrian side of Bayshore blaring a radio and drawing attention with a megaphone. 

“I walked out of the house and said ‘Are you kidding me?’” says Malla’s girlfriend Jessica Corbat, 26, of Seminole. “I couldn’t believe they were making it, and I didn’t think it would roll. But here it is.”

From Kevin Smetana:

From left to right, John Simon, Anthony Basilicato and Simon Hiracheta, started the unofficial Krewe of Safety First ten years ago.

What do you do if you want to be part of a Gasparilla Krewe but you don’t have ties to an existing one or enough money to join one? It’s simple—start your own. That’s exactly what three men did ten years ago when they started the Krewe of Safety First.

“We wanted a gimmick and that’s what we came up with,” said Anthony Basilicato, one of three men in the krewe. “We couldn’t afford to be part of a real krewe.”

Basilicato, along with Simon Hiracheta and John Simon, continue their Gasparilla tradition today. The three men are set up on Bayshore Blvd., where they’ve been since this morning to guarantee a good spot for the parade. They proudly sport their beads along with orange life jackets—and they claim to even have a first-aid kit with them in case anything goes wrong.