Good idea on taking a year off, Schoonerfest, for all the reasons stated in the announcement in this week’s print edition and online.

Schoonerfest has not blossomed into a Damariscotta Pumpkinfest drawing people by the droves, nor should it try to be, necessarily. We have seen other Wiscasset annual events like Wings Over Wiscasset (WOW) come and go, and others that show no signs of stopping, like First Congregational Church of Wiscasset’s Summerfest and St. Philip’s Church’s Strawberry Festival, several decades in; and seen newer successes of the last several years, including Wiscasset’s Scarecrowfest, Wiscasset Art Walk and Bands for Books.

Events that are no more are not failures any more than the peninsula’s Fishermen’s Festival was. They succeeded – they happened, and made memories, whether the ones of the old-fashioned dancing at Wings, or the Fishermen’s fish relay that lives on with Windjammer Days. 

And not that Schoonerfest is either a failure, or a no-more. The group is planning the 2024 edition and, even if it never comes, which it still sounds like it will, any event that had large, small, or medium numbers of people boarding vessels, talking with their crews, singing, dancing and more, for one year or 40, was, for that time, those moments turned memories, a success.

I wrote this in an editorial published at wiscassetnewspaper.com Aug. 11, 2021 and in our Aug. 12, 2021 print edition, a week before the inaugural Schoonerfest: “We will root for Schoonerfest as we did WOW, and just as we continue to laud the longtime annual events, including those that did not make it back this year as the pandemic goes on.”

The church ones we mentioned that canceled their big summertime events in the pandemic’s first year did return; and – here is the weekly positive parting thought – we will root for the next Schoonerfest.