Revisiting the Ocracoke Crab Festival: A 1987 Memory

Revisiting the Ocracoke Crab Festival: A 1987 Memory

This post is part of an ongoing project: scanning my old slides, prints, and negatives (late 1970’s to 2004) to digital.

Click here to see all scanned image posts

In preparation for our upcoming trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, here is a revisit of a trip we made there in 1987. The highlight of the excursion was the annual Ocracoke Crab Festival… but there was a lot more to the trip.

The Ocracoke Crab Festival, held in early May from 1984 to 1989, was a popular event hosted by the Ocracoke Civic Club Business Committee. It was very much an informal, down-home party. The festival featured a variety of crab-themed activities. These included crab races, a crab cooking contest, a crab picking contest, and crab pot pulling demonstrations. The festival drew attention with more than two thousand pounds of crab meat. Kegs of beer and huge trays of Cole slaw were also a major draw. The festival was revitalized as an early Fall event after Hurricane Dorian hit in 2019.

The Festival started with a foot race to raise money for Brian Newell. He was a small child who had serious eye operations. If memory serves, the race was a flat 5K or 10K. It went out of the village into the undeveloped island and returned back. My biggest memory, having run it, was the wind was always at your back going out. It felt like hitting a brick wall when you turned and headed back in. The crowds of locals and visitors cheering when you came back into the village proper was great!

Click here to see all my Ocracoke/ Outer Banks posts… through the years.