10-Day SeaFest Opens With Music, Contests

More than 50,000 people are expected to flock to Newport Beach for the 10-day SeaFest festival that kicks off today with jazz and rock music and booths from 37 local restaurants.

Sponsored by the city’s Chamber of Commerce, the festival will offer more than 30 free events including sailing regattas, surfing competitions, sandcastle-building contests and volleyball tournaments.

“It’s a mini-Olympics,” said Jim Harnage, president of the Chamber’s marine division. “It’s something that people in the close communities can enjoy” and participate in without competing with traffic generated during tourist season.

“If we had done this during the summer, we would have gridlocked 10 miles of highway,” Harnage said. “The city wouldn’t have allowed it.”

Because the festival is not being held during the summer, it is able to consolidate several annual events that would have otherwise drawn crowds too large for the city to handle. The point of SeaFest, Chamber President Richard Luehars said, is to let local residents know about the recreational opportunities in Newport Beach and how to take advantage of them.

“We understand that Newport Beach is the playground for the harbor area and we want to encourage that,” he said.

The Taste of Newport food festival kicks off SeaFest at Newport Center Fashion Island starting today at 5 p.m. The fair will include live jazz, Dixieland and rock music. Booths from 37 local restaurants will sell food and drinks until 9 p.m.

On Saturday at 8 a.m., the beach near 50th Street will host a surfing competition with almost 150 participants. Both long-board and short-board surfing will be judged until noon.

Harnage said that most of the sports events including volleyball tournaments, surf contests and boat races will include participants of all ages and abilities, “not just semipro big jock people.”

The sandcastle-building contest on Sunday is expected to draw around 2,000 people to Corona del Mar State Beach beginning at noon. At Balboa Park, a kite-flying contest will start at 10:30 a.m.

On both Saturday and Sunday, the Navy will be offering tours of the 609-foot dock landing ship Fort McHenry which will be anchored 200 yards off Corona del Mar.

The wooden boat festival will held through the weekend of Sept. 22 to 24 and includes two boat parades and a “macho men’s regatta” on the last day of SeaFest, Sept. 24. The “down-and-dirty” boat competition will have the distinction of being the only boat race to start without a boat.

Each two-person team gets a box of nails, a hammer, a saw, some wood and glue and starts building. Participants have 1 1/2 hours to create a boat and row it through a short course.

“The engineering often lacks something and most of them go down,” leaving the sailors to swim ashore, Harnage said.

The Chamber of Commerce has spent around $270,000 promoting the festival and organizing the events, but Harnage said he expects it to generate close to $1 million in revenue for the city.