The 10th annual Anegada Lobster Festival has been hailed by Director of Tourism Clive McCoy as a well-attended and well executed event.
The activity, which was held over the past weekend, invited hundreds of visitors to the island of Anegada for days of culinary and cultural experiences.
While the final figures have not yet been tallied, McCoy expects that this year’s activity showed significant growth from the previous year.
“I haven’t gotten the final turnout as yet, but based on the ferries that we saw coming in and couple that with the USVI ferries that came in with USVI guests I would assume that we had more than we had last year, especially with persons feeling more comfortable with the COVID restrictions being lifted”, he said.
Traffic from outside of the territory, he noted, was a major factor to the success of the event.
McCoy noted that as the Lobster Festival continues to grow, it may present more opportunities for regional tourism coming into the BVI.
McCoy explained, “We saw a significant contingent from the USVI which bodes well for regional tourism and it’s something that we’ve been focused on considering the challenges that we had with COVID. We understand that our USVI brothers and sisters can easily travel to the destination and enjoy what we have and we are planning to expand that into other jurisdictions… because regional tourism is something that all of us in the region understand is important to continue its development especially with easier airlift into the territory”.
This year’s event, dubbed a “Decade of Decadent Celebration” featured many of the expected events of the Lobster Fest including the iconic bar crawl, and various evening events which kept the food and party going all weekend.
It also featured some new attractions including “Lobster Ice Cream” offered by the Wonky Dog restaurant.
Various departments of the Government of the Virgin Islands were on the ground, each playing an important role to the success and safety of the event. To all of which McCoy sent special thanks.
“I’d like to send a special shout out to all the Government Departments that enabled us to pull this off. A lot of the agencies like the Police, Immigration, Health Services Authority and the list goes on. They are the backbone of this type of event and they did extremely well in making sure that everyone had a safe and wonderful time… from all accounts things went well and I’m very proud in terms of the effort they put in”, he said.
“I’d also like to thank the Anegada Community for coming out and participating at such a high level. I was very proud to see how many of them actually had entertainment and the samples were great. No complaints here”, he added.
He noted that the Tourist Board intends to work with this momentum, as it begins planning for next year’s activity.