A Keys festival was canceled due to COVID-19. But a summer event is in the works

The annual Original Marathon Seafood Festival won’t happen in March as planned due to COVID-19, organizers of the Middle Keys city’s 45-year tradition said Wednesday.

They canceled the two-day festival, which draws about 20,000 people to the Marathon Community Park at mile marker 49, having held it last year as the pandemic began to take hold.

But this time around, the festival set for March 13 and 14, is off.

“We were hoping cases would be looking better by then, but that’s just not the case, and with the planning it takes it’s just too much to risk (safety, time, and monies),” festival organizers posted on Facebook.

“Many of our volunteers are 60-plus years old and we would never want to put them or anyone at risk,” they added.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Keys had a known total of 3,868 COVID-19 cases and 28 deaths.

The decision to cancel was made Monday at the Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors meeting, said Daniel Samess, the chamber’s CEO.

It was unanimous, he said.

“They all understood it’s the right thing to do,” Samess said. “The timing just wasn’t going to work. That event takes a lot of planning. It’s not like we could wait a whole lot longer.”

Started in 1976, the festival is sponsored by the Organized Fishermen of Florida’s Marathon chapter and the Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce.

The event helps generate about $20,000 in scholarships from the chamber per year, Samess said, and the fishermen group gives away more than $10,000 a year in scholarships.

While the seafood festival is canceled, the chamber has started to plan a new event for the summer of 2021 that will include food, live music and vendors.

“We’re still finalizing that,” Samess said. “We definitely want to do something in the mid to late summer.”

The chamber has consulted officials at the Florida Department of Health, he said.

“They felt a lot more comfortable with that time frame,” Samess said.

The 2020 festival drew about half the people it typically does, he said, but raised some money for scholarships.

“We still did $10,000,” Samess said.

This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 3:36 PM.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.