I hate seeing articles like this. 10 years ago CBS Sunday Mornings brought the local Pumpkin Fest to the National Spotlight and the hordes of touristas who invade the town every year make it hell for those of us who live nearby...
Is That Pumpkin Seaworthy? No Promises.
In Maine, a pumpkin regatta is fighting dry summers and rising costs. (Its boats are mostly fighting to stay afloat.)
On a cool October morning in Maine, a man with a foot-long beard sank his foot-long knife into a giant pumpkin. It was a small one, he explained: just 674 pounds, about the weight of a baby grand piano.
The pumpkin was in the early stages of its transformation into a seafaring vessel. Tom Lishness, a Navy veteran who takes pride in his resemblance to the Travelocity gnome, cut a circular hatch. He measured its diameter, and then his waistline.
He added a layer of carpeting to the cabin — for comfort, and also because pumpkin guts are slippery — and bolted on a plywood deck that he was optimistic would support the weight of an eight-horsepower outboard motor. He had a good feeling about this one, but boats made out of pumpkins can always surprise you.
“You don’t know how her personality is going to be until you get her in the water,” Mr. Lishness said.
Mr. Lishness, 67, has been setting off for nearly two decades in the Damariscotta Pumpkin Regatta, an annual race between “squashbucklers” in
midcoast Maine. In a town 50 miles northeast of Portland, competitors climb into gourds the size of golf carts and splash around a chilly harbor. Winning is nice, but most participants are just trying to stay afloat.
Tom Lishness has been captaining pumpkin boats since 2005. This year’s gourd, named Fiona, was more than 100 pounds lighter than those of his competitors.
Mr. Lishness hardly seemed interested in discussing the handful of trophies he had won in the regatta over the years; he spent a lot more time rehashing the single time his pumpkin flipped, in 2009. (He thinks his mistake was reusing a piece of weakened wood to mount the motor.)
This year, he was determined to stay dry. His wife would not be watching from the shore, he said, because she is sick of hearing him talk about pumpkins.
The tradition began in 2005, when two locals, Buzz Pinkham and Bill Clark, came across a picture of a pumpkin boat in a book about extreme gardening. (Similar boats had been built in New Hampshire and Nova Scotia in the late 1990s.) The pair grew a 754-pound gourd, and Mr. Pinkham took it for a cruise.
It went “fast, for a pumpkin,” Mr. Pinkham, now 70, recalled.
The regatta has expanded to include more than two dozen boaters in two divisions: pumpkins powered by kayak paddles, and those with motors. The race has become the culmination of the town’s Pumpkinfest, a four-day celebration that draws thousands of people to the area, extending the town’s tourist season. When the second weekend in October rolls around, no pumpkin in the region is safe from being carved, smashed, raced or eaten.
But the volunteers who run the festival are worried about far more than just wobbly gourds, said Todd Sandstrum, a farmer and one of the regatta’s co-chairs.
As the event has grown, rising insurance and public safety costs have become harder to meet. Some residents have complained about the throngs of tourists and lack of parking. And a drought in Maine this year meant that the giant pumpkins were less, well, giant than usual.
There are no guarantees in the world of pumpkin boat racing. “At the end of a day, you climb into a pumpkin and you pray,” Mr. Sandstrum said.
The ‘Cadillac of Giant Fruit’
The day before the race, a garage just outside Damariscotta looked something like a psychedelic pumpkin patch. One gourd was being spray-painted silver, to resemble a pot of soup, by two women who planned to paddle it dressed as chefs. Another had been equipped with a hull fit for
Jeff Bezos’ superyacht.
Mr. Lishness eyed the competition. A younger generation of pumpkin boat racers had come up behind him, using power tools to carve their pumpkins instead of his trusty kitchen knife. He was amused by their decorations, but not enough to change his approach. As usual, he would be accessorizing his pumpkin with a few garden gnomes attached to the deck with Velcro.
“It shows off the fruit to her best advantage,” he said.
His pumpkin, named Fiona, was more than 100 pounds lighter than the other gourds in the motorboat division. It was grown by Sarah Whitty, the president of the Maine Pumpkin Growers Organization, in Veazie, Maine, where the weather is not always pumpkin-friendly.
Ms. Whitty had shoveled the snow out of her pumpkin patch in April and planted her seeds outside in May. She set up heat lamps intended for baby chicks, and tossed on one of her grandmother’s old comforters for an added layer of warmth.
But it was a brutal growing season. The region
fell into a drought during the summer that has persisted into the fall. Ms. Whitty’s water supply was not disrupted, but she overfertilized, causing some of her plants to shrivel up and die. She also had to fight off squash vine borers, a bug that has moved into her area in the past three years as the climate in Maine has become warmer.
“I have nightmares at night that things are eating my pumpkins, that it cracks on the way to the weigh-off,” Ms. Whitty, 37, said.
She ended up producing two regatta-worthy pumpkins and a couple of
giant marrows, a cousin of zucchini, which she turned into a lopsided pontoon boat. Even though it was not made of pumpkins, regatta organizers decided to allow it to compete — a first for the competition.
“This is the Cadillac of giant fruit vessels,” Dale Hartt, Ms. Whitty’s partner, said as he unstrapped the watercraft from its trailer.
Pumpkin mania has become part of the identity of Damariscotta, a close-knit town with a population of 2,300 that is known for its
slurpable oysters and lakeside cottages. The festival is put together by volunteers who have full-time jobs — Ms. Whitty is a physician assistant — yet devote dozens of hours a week to the cultivation and appreciation of giant gourds. A group of around two dozen event chairs begins meeting each February to plan the races, a parade, a pie-eating contest and pumpkin derby.
“I still don’t understand this town’s affinity for pumpkins, but every town has something,” said Michael Greenstreet, a chef at the oyster joint Shuck Station.
The festival delivers an essential influx of cash for seasonal businesses, said Brendan Parsons, 36, the restaurant’s owner. He has been happy to watch it grow, he said, and appreciates that it brings in people beyond Damariscotta’s typical crowd of “whitehairs.”
Other residents are less enthusiastic. “I live up the street, and I can’t take the craziness,” said Kurt Oehme, 75, a gardener who lives in Damariscotta Mills. He had grown one of the pumpkins that was used as a paddle boat, but he did not plan to watch it compete because of the crowds.
The festival organizers are used to those kinds of complaints. People are going to take a swipe at anything that has been around for 20 years, Jed Weiss, Pumpkinfest’s executive director, said over oysters and beer at the pub he used to own on Main Street.
“There’s nobody making any money here — we do it for the town,” he said.
Organizers are more concerned about the event’s finances. Around 85 percent of its expenses are covered by sponsorships from businesses, with the remainder coming from merchandise sales, fees for select events and donations.
Entry to the festival is free to the public. But costs — for public safety, traffic management, infrastructure and insurance — have increased by 8 to 10 percent in the past few years, organizers said.
“Us and so many other free, community-based activities are struggling with the rising cost of everything,” said Lisa Conway Macnair, a co-chair of the regatta. (An event that launches amateur boaters and their D.I.Y. vessels into a tidal river has seemed to be a particularly tough sell to insurers.)
For the first time this year, organizers hung posters with QR codes around town asking for donations to help keep the event going.
The town has come to depend on Pumpkinfest for far more than just tourist revenue, argued Mr. Pinkham, the regatta co-founder. It gives locals and tourists alike a rare opportunity to learn about where their food comes from, to laugh at something absurd and to connect across generations and political divisions.
“You could say it takes a village to grow a pumpkin, but really, it takes a pumpkin to grow a village,” he said.
‘Not a Hydrodynamic Object'
’
At noon on race day, a forklift hoisted each pumpkin from a trailer and slipped it down a boat launch. Some spectators had set up lawn chairs to watch the pumpkins bob in the harbor; others had arrived by sea to watch from kayaks and fishing boats.
For boat captains, this was the moment of truth.
Mr. Lishness looked tense. His pumpkin was floating, but it listed from side to side when he climbed in. “Oh man, this is a scary boat,” he said.
Ms. Whitty, the pumpkin grower, made her way down the dock with a sandbag for him to use as ballast. She dropped it in, causing the pumpkin to sag even lower in the water.
“I think that made it worse,” she said.
It is hard to say who will make a good pumpkin boat captain, although core strength and a low center of gravity seem to be helpful, said Jaja Martin, 64, an experienced sailor and frequent champion of the paddle boat division. She was dressed as Snoopy, and competing with several of her family members in a pumpkin decorated to look like the Red Baron airplane.
Michael Ball, 31, Ms. Martin’s nephew and a rookie pumpkin racer in town from Colorado, had pre-race jitters. “It’s not a hydrodynamic object,” he said.
The race began at high tide. Char Corbett, a former pastor, offered a blessing of the fleet over the loudspeakers, and the paddle boats were off, racing toward an orange buoy halfway across the harbor.
The first boat capsized less than one pumpkin length from the dock, spilling Briar Bouthot into the 55-degree water. (Mr. Bouthot, who was paddling on behalf of one of the regatta’s sponsors, Shipyard Brewing, had a pack of beer waiting for him on the shore.)
The other boats survived minor collisions as they rounded the buoy — thwacking another pumpkin with your paddle is perfectly legal — and the Red Baron surged to victory in the final stretch.
Then the three motorboats were up. Mr. Lishness sped away from the dock, wearing a pointy red gnome hat. He was up against Mr. Pinkham, in a “Pink Pony” pumpkin decorated in tribute to the singer Chappell Roan, and Josh Felter, a 38-year-old contractor whose boat looked like a supersize rubber ducky.
Mr. Felter soon lost control of his vessel and drifted off course. His motor had cut out, he explained afterward, and he needed to be dragged back in by a kayaker.
Mr. Lishness proceeded with caution, sacrificing speed for stability, and was overtaken by the Pink Pony pumpkin. The gap between the two boats widened. After two laps around the buoys and some confusion about the racecourse, Mr. Pinkham cruised back to the dock for a commanding win.
“Having been in tippy gourds before, I knew what to expect,” Mr. Pinkham said. He held up his prize, a gold trophy shaped like a pumpkin.
Their short seafaring careers behind them, the boats were hauled out of the water to be composted. More than 900 of their seeds had been rinsed in a colander and labeled; in May, they would be given out to the town’s residents to grow next year’s fleet of pumpkin boats.
As the crowds packed up their picnic blankets and headed off for lobster rolls, Mr. Lishness stood alone on the dock, enjoying a few final moments with Fiona the pumpkin.
He had spent more than 10 hours across two days painstakingly constructing the boat. Was there some part of him, however small, that was disappointed he had not won?
Nope. “I didn’t go swimming,” he said, as chipper as ever. He pulled his gnome figurines off their Velcro mounts and cradled them in his arms like precious cargo as he made his way ashore.
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