The important Hong Kong summer milestones: first crazy hot day; intern day when youths arrive to do your bitch work; Typhoon 8 day when you don’t have to work; I-set-the-AC-too-cold-and-am-sick day... and junk day. For tourists reading the mag, a junk is a yacht except it's full of insane drunk people and blasts Katy Perry music. And, despite miles of open ocean, you’ll find everybody gathered next in a limited number of different coves off of Lamma, Lantau and Sai Kung.

Junk day signifies the beginning of the end of sobriety. With the notable exception of the Sevens, we’re generally not prepared to drink all day and wear basically no clothing. On junk day we do that and then some since the chance of your bathing suit being stolen is about 80 percent. Also, when you pass out somebody will push you in the water and you wake up submerged three feet in the ocean dodging cans of beer thrown at your head. It’s like a reverse bar mitzvah—on junk day, a man becomes a boy.

My first junk of the season was last week at my friend’s birthday. It started off civilized as always: bleary-eyed partygoers still showing the effects of Friday night met somewhere too hot and sunny and loaded beers, chips and 10 bottles of vodka onto a junk. An “I-hate-my-job-but-sigh-it-pays-the-bills” captain and his assistant wearing a permascowl assisted us as “Teenage Dream” blasted through the Causeway Bay marina. I decided shots before noon (“SBN”) was the correct way to begin, so SBN it was and we drank a lot of diet soda and put on too little sunscreen. It was looking like a pretty good day.

Junk day has important rules and I made sure to follow them to the best of my ability:
 

1. Always find somebody more out of control than you. Then, casually tell everyone “Wow, he/she’s really drunk.” So no matter how drunk you get, you have already incepted everyone into believing this other person is a complete mess so you can get away scot-free without embarrassment. This also works at cocktail parties.
2. Encourage somebody to jump into the water before you. There might be rocks below so you need a guinea pig. It’s OK if it’s the aforementioned drunk person but anyone will suffice. Kids are great for this, especially when you have been tricked onto a junk with kids asking, “Uncle Yalun, why are you vomiting in the water?”
3. Take a nap if you’re tired but ensure you’re nowhere close to anybody with a pen who will draw a penis on your face.

And we were off. We swam, drank and were merry, went retro with Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” and practiced throwing beers off the side and catching them in the air as we jumped in the water (note: this never works). The main drama of the day came when I tried to mount an inflatable whale in the water but was too confused about how to get on, and in the skirmish the whale floated away. “STOP!“ I yelled but it was unsuccessful because whales don’t speak English and this was also a toy made out of plastic. “Let’s get it!” I said to my friend Jeremy who said “raowhjwaet” (he was a bit drunk), and off we went.

“Let it go! You’ll never catch it. You’ll die!” someone screamed but after about five minutes we ignored her since we were tracking the whale. “I think it’s going south,” I told Jeremy who said “greesat@$!” and we swam after it with all our might. Finally, we were only 900 meters away from it. Oh shit. We flagged down a jet-ski and asked them to save our whale. “Now we need to get back to the boat,” I told Jeremy, who was floating face down in the water.

Yalun Tu is a columnist for HK Magazine. You can reach him at yalun.tu@gmail.com or @yaluntu on Twitter.