The Pleasure Island Seafood Blues & Jazz Festival is a relaxed weekend that caters mostly to a Wilmington-area audience of day-trippers. Of course many who attend come from across the state and even the country. When we were there for the 2014 festival, the emcee introduced audience members he said had come from Alaska.
The festival has been a two-day event on the second weekend in October every year but was cancelled in 2018 because of a hurricane and held in April 2019. In 2020, it became a single-day event.
The show is presented on a permanent main stage for blues acts and a small stage for jazz acts that sits on the banks of the Cape Fear River. The home of the festival is the Fort Fisher Air Force Recreation Area, a beach retreat for members of the military. Though the festival is at a campground, it does not allow overnight camping (see the recreation area map below).
The open field in front of the stage accommodates the crowd comfortably, in part perhaps because the sponsoring Pleasure Island Chamber of Commerce limits the number of tickets sold. Trees at the rear of the field provide some respite from the sun. We were with a friend in a wheelchair, and found that a concrete RV pad at the back of the field was a good place to set up.
A row of sponsors' tents flanked the left-hand side of the field (look close); pop-ups are not allowed otherwise.
The jazz stage, below, is in a small performance tent behind the restaurant that is part of the recreation area. The riverside setting is pretty and the restaurant's porch and the yard next to it provide room for a small audience.
Though "seafood" is the festival's first name, the food offering was small and mostly of the typical vendor variety though, as might be expected of any festival at the beach, many did feature seafood. We overheard one person opine that, "They should take 'seafood' off of the name, because there's really not much to it." For that matter, there were more booths presented by wineries than there were seafood sellers, and wine, beer and liquor sales were a central part of the festival.
To be fair, the amount of seafood offered may vary from year to year. We overheard someone else point out to friends that vendors' booths and other amenities are arranged differently every year.
A craft vendors' village was set up in what is normally the tent camping area (note the grill below), and a nearby kids' area had a couple of inflatables, magicians who performed several times, face painting and the like.
The river, which is a few yards from the main stage, makes it a scenic setting, particularly at sunset.
Later Saturday evening, the large empty area behind the sound booth tent provided room for kids to play and couples to dance.
The inset below from the upper-right of the map shows the portion of the recreation area used for the festival. Parking is in a large field where the "Fort Fisher AF Recreation Area" logo is on the full map. The walk to the festival site is shorter than it looks, but volunteers in golf carts are ready to help folks get there.
Because of the single entrance to the recreation area, it's a very slow exit at the end of each day's show.
Here's more about camping and cottage and mobile home rental options at Fort Fisher Air Force Recreation Area.
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