Sitka Seafood Festival issues SOS

Esther Burdick comes up empty in the Bobbing-for-Fish Heads event during the 2015 festival. She would eventually land her humpy. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey).
Esther Burdick comes up empty in the Bobbing-for-Fish Heads event during the 2015 festival. She would eventually land her humpy. (KCAW photo/Robert Woolsey).

The Sitka Seafood Festival has issued a call for help after the 2016 event was placed on hold earlier this year.

Alicia Haseltine, vice president of the festival board, said the decision was made after the festival lost several of its leaders.

“Last year was our sixth year, and each year it’s continued to grow,” said Haseltine. “As it’s grown, the amount of people involved kind of stayed the same, so the workload wasn’t getting distributed as much as we’d hoped. Unfortunately about half of our board members ended up leaving town, including our director, which makes it very difficult to continue going how it has been going.”

In previous years, the festival offered cooking classes, meals, films, music and games focusing on the community’s fishing industry and seafood traditions.

The festival was run by volunteers. After year two, a nonprofit was established. Now, Haseltine said they’re looking for another organization or corps of volunteers to bring the festival into the future.

“To see it continue to grow we’d like to shift focus a little bit and see if we can get a fishing organization or someone in the tourism business or someone in the culinary industry who might want to spearhead it, and we can continue working on it from there,” said Haseltine.

Current board members and volunteers are holding a meeting to discuss the future of the Sitka Seafood Festival at 6 p.m. Aug. 18 at the Sealing Cove Business Center.

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