I found America's craziest sports fans in the most unlikely city

The crowd here at Lumen Field have twice claimed a Guinness World Records' title for the loudest crowd roar ... ever (137.6 decibels, comparable to a jet taking off nearby). I know this because every time the home team (the Seahawks, playing American football in the NFL) do something - or remotely look like doing something - the crowd screams and a decibel monitor shows up on the gigantic score board, encouraging us to "go for another record". "One time," a Seahawks fan ingesting a Seattle dog (hot dog with cream cheese and onions) tells me, during bites. "We screamed so loud, it registered on the Richter Scale." (Yep, this actually happened).

I'm sitting next to a New York Giants fan who flew five hours to watch his team. "Do you get this kind of noise in New York?" I ask. "God, no," he says. "Seattle fans are wayyy crazier than New York fans." Anyone who thinks New York is the wildest place on Earth to watch live sport obviously hasn't been to Seattle. In my trendy inner-city hotel this morning, football fans dressed in team colours were lined up five-deep waiting for breakfast heavy on Mimosas.

I rode a Lime scooter a few blocks along the harbour front to the stadium and it felt like New Year's Eve. The city was heaving; bars were overflowing ... at 9.30am; and fans were "tail-gating" already in the carpark outside (a famed component of American football culture, people gather hours early to socialise and drink on the tail-gates of their 4WDs).

Seattle's downtown is only eight blocks wide - and there's over 7000 hotel rooms within it, along with the city's major sports stadiums - so it doesn't matter what sport's on: when it's on, Seattle feels like it's hosting the Super Bowl, and the World Series (of baseball) on the same weekend. And yet, who knew it? That a city famous as the very antithesis of "jock" culture, might well be the best city in America for watching sport - Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell must be spinning in their graves.

What I like most is that nothing about watching sport here is like anything we know in Australia. Take sail-gating, for instance. Melbourne might be Australia's most iconic spectator sport city, but you can't take a chartered pink tiki bar boat there along a lake amongst thousands of other football fans right to a football stadium with 70,000 fans.

Just north of downtown, over 3000 revelers are weaving in around me on pirate boats, luxury yachts, decommissioned trawlers - even hot tub boats - in a sheltered part of Lake Washington where movies like Sleepless In Seattle - I can see Tom Hank's houseboat in front of me - were filmed. I'm standing at the bar of my boat with Nirvana blaring as we pass through narrow passages beneath historic bridges where thousands of fans line the water in the purple and gold colours of their beloved University of Washington Huskies team (this was where George Clooney's The Boys In The Boat was filmed, which documented the University of Washington rowing team's efforts to make the 1936 Olympics).

Despite the party vibe, none of this feels like "bogans out boozing". There's a sophistication about watching live sport in Seattle. College football, for one, attracts fans who spend thousands of dollars to cross the country to watch their old college play (it's even bigger business than the NFL).

And watching sport in Seattle is as much about the scenery. I can look out across Seattle's harbour to the blue waters of Puget Sound from my seat at Lumen Field and here, the snow-tipped Cascade Mountain Ranges stretch across the horizon against a backdrop of multi-million-dollar houseboats (Bill Gates has a holiday home nearby).

Ticket prices are cheaper here too than other sports-mad American cities, especially New York and Los Angeles. The Seahawks, for instance, sell tickets cheaper than other NFL teams, starting from $US99 and 10 per cent of their seats must be sold at a price no higher than the average lowest ticket price last season. Little wonder every sport I watch here attracts as many families. There's plenty more options here too - women's soccer team, Seattle Reign, also play out of Lumen Field while the Seattle Mariners baseball team play in the 50,0000 capacity T-Mobile Park, 100 metres south. Ice hockey team, Seattle Kraken, play in the NHL at an ice rink a few blocks north.

For a city most famous to Australians for its '90s grunge music scene which established the notion that Seattle people lived like vampires in a bleak, grey city, this city's existence seems to revolve around watching sport and doing it, in brilliant sunshine.

The writer travelled courtesy of Visit Seattle and State of Washington Tourism