WELLFLEET — In its seventh year running, the Wellfleet OysterFest pulled off yet another successful weekend. Lisa Brown, president of SPAT (Shellfish Promotion and Tasting), the non-profit organization that organizes the festival, estimated that a crowd of about 18,000 attended the event, spread between 10,500 on Saturday and 7,500 on Sunday.
SPAT hopes to have grossed roughly $100,000, about half of which will go towards the cost of the event. The other approximately $50,000 raised will go to the SPAT education fund (grant applications can be found online at www.wellfleetoysterfest.org/scholarships.html).
Local vendors also raised a good amount in the last push of the season, with the benefit booth for Caleb Potter meeting with particular success. The booth sold out of everything from oysters to specially designed T-shirts and sweatshirts to oyster stickers to pirate flags. “We did really well,” said Shaye Cavanaugh, a booth organizer and close friend of Potter’s. “Way better than we expected. I want to send out a big thank you from Caleb to everyone who donated—it’s all going to the right place.”
Satellite events also met with unprecedented success. The cooking demonstrations, which were held twice each day at the Masonic Temple on Commercial Street, were standing room only. Evening events such as the oyster follies, “Bye-Bye Bulgaria and other Tales of a Summer Ending,” hosted by Kevin Rice, filled the library.
Barbara Austin won the annual Oyster Shuck-Off for the second year running with an adjusted time of 2 minutes, 50 seconds in the final round, while Keith Rose came in second and Asa Nadue cruised into third. To the delight of the crowd, Austin donated her $1,000 in prize money to the Wellfleet Preservation Hall and dedicated the decision to Wellfleet’s children, in particular Caleb Potter, who was seriously injured in a skateboard accident on July 4, and Barbara Jordan, who died recently from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident.
In academic action, fourth-grader Daniel Fetter of the Daniel Butler School in Belmont took first place in the fourth annual Wellfleet OysterFest Spelling Bee. Fetter took the Littleneck Division (ages 12 and under) on Saturday at the library in front of a standing room only crowd. Tension mounted as the 18 young spellers battled to the finals, where Fetter took the prize with “amateur” and “mussel.” Seventh-grader Sally Gillis of Jamaica Plain, a student at Boston Latin School, took second, while local Nauset Regional Middle School sixth-grader April Poole of Orleans captured third.
Happily, there were no major incidents or accidents during the festival. Parking was accommodated by the addition of satellite parking and shuttle buses to and from beach parking lots all over town. Event organizers also saw some improvement in foot traffic over last year’s OysterFest, citing the move of the SPAT booth to behind the town hall as one way of relieving the bottleneck in the parking lot. Police Chief Richard Rosenthal told SPAT members that he was “thrilled” with how the weekend was pulled off.
Oct 18th, 2007
