Lobster festival tallies best year ever

ROCKLAND – The Maine Lobster Festival keeps cracking records.

For five days, the 56th Maine Lobster Festival was crawling with people in search of lobster – nearly 26,000 pounds were sold, which is the best year ever. By 11 a.m. Sunday a record 11 tons in lobster sales was surpassed. At the end of the festival, 25,520 pounds of the craved crustaceans had been dished out.

Besides the sale of lobster, the festival broke its record in the number of souvenirs sold, Festival president Ed Kolmosky said Sunday, “by a lot!” T-shirts, jackets, hats and lobster trinkets sold like hotcakes.

“It’s unreal,” Kolmosky said about the number of festival-goers. “It just goes and goes and goes.” Like last year, more than 100,000 people walked through the festival gates from Wednesday through Sunday, he said, noting that the count might have been much greater if it hadn’t rained two days during the event. “Saturday was the biggest day.”

The feature attraction for Sunday was the Great International William Atwood Lobster Crate Race, which drew about 85 participants and thousands of spectators. The goal of the watery competition is to run across a string of 50 lobster crates as many times as possible without falling into the drink. Eventually, it happens to the best of them.

Thousands of people lined the seawall, public pier and the Black Pearl Restaurant’s private wharf, for a glimpse of contestants racing across the crates and splashing into Rockland Harbor. Some people ventured out by boat, be it rowboat or powered vessel, to watch the race. A couple of men maneuvered kayaks between the pilings beneath the restaurant for a front row seat of sorts.

One by one the crate runners scrambled across the floating wooden boxes hoping to beat the all-time record 3,007 crates held by Susan Lundquist of Owls Head. There was a thunder of applause as each contestant successfully ran the stretch from one dock to the other.

The winner of Sunday’s crate race was Shawn Fitzpatrick of New York, who traversed “500-plus” floating wooden boxes, Kolmosky said, explaining that race organizers stopped the winner early because he was so far ahead of any of the other participants. The prize is: “You get to run next year,” he said.

The previous day’s big draw was the annual parade down Main Street, which almost went off without a hitch.

Reportedly, two little girls were injured when they scrambled into the road to gather candy, which was being thrown from floats. The Rockland Police Department officer, who handled the case, could not be reached Sunday in time for details.

Siren-screaming fire engines, marching fife and drum bands, frolicking clowns and antique cars paraded through the downtown, which was jam-packed with people.

Saturday evening’s drizzly, wet weather didn’t dampen spirits or the number of fans who turned out to hear The Neville Brothers of New Orleans belt out their favorite tunes.

Over the course of the festival, there were no problems that the directors couldn’t fix, Kolmosky said, because they love what they are doing and they have “good community spirit.”

Kolmosky couldn’t put his finger on any one thing that makes the festival grow year after year, except “the fact that people come here and have a good time and it’s safe.”