Visitors find food, fun and fellowship at old-time fishing village of Cortez

A day after motoring across the intercoastal waterway in a dinghy, Anna Maria Island residents Emily Williams and Natalie Baird rode over the bridge on their bicycles. For two days, there was no place they would rather be than at the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival.

“It’s just the food in general,” said Baird, adding, “Growing up on the island, I like to do anything to keep Cortez, Cortez.”

The local fare, along with local flair displayed by artists, crafters, food purveyors and musicians were among the reasons many people came to the 36th annual event, billed as “a party with a purpose.”

Purpose indeed, the festival is the primary fundraiser for the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage (FISH).

Nancy Strehlow, a retired snowbird from Seattle who lives in the old schoolhouse on 45th street, has been a fixture at the two-day event for all three winters that she has resided in Cortez. On Sunday, she purchased a hat to support a local crafter.

“I like the people and it’s Cortez, an old fishing village,” she said. Captiva Island, where she used to live, “used to be like this, but now it’s fancy.”

Fancy is something former Anna Maria Island resident Sydney McConnell was not interested in. That is not why people come to the festival, she noted, saying for Manatee County residents, “It’s somewhere to come where you live.”

Festival official John Stevely estimated the weekend crowds at more than 20,000, which is more than last year’s event that was hampered somewhat by inclement weather.

“It just slowly keeps growing and getting better because it’s so good,” said Stevely, a retired marine biologist. “This is the last old-time fishing village remaining in the U.S.”

Stevely has a point. Sandra and Jonathan Parker, who are vacationing in Sarasota, have visited coastlines in Myrtle Beach and Virginia Beach. They have not seen anything comparable on their excursions elsewhere.

“They run the boats and fish out of some places, but we’ve never seen a nice, little festival like this,” Sandra Parker said.

“And we learned a thing or two about fish caught in the local waters,” her husband added.

Several fishermen were on hand to chat with festival-goers about the fishing industry. They were joined by Dr. Angela Collins and Dr. Theresa Bert. Collins is an expert on reef fish and grouper while Bert’s areas are crab and shrimp.

“We just want (the public) to understand about some of the local seafood that’s available to them,” Collins said. “We want to encourage the consumer to buy local seafood when they can.”

Preston Rowden, a Cortez fisherman for more than four decades, appreciated the efforts of those educators. But, he added, “The best part is people get to come here and see the way of life that we live.”

Nearby on a dock where Collins and Bert educated people and displayed native fish, there was an open tank for children and adults to lean into and touch different species.

Trevor Wolford, a seventh-grader at Manatee School for the Arts, leaned in to touch a horseshoe crab.

“It was really weird,” he said. “It was spiky and really alien-like on the bottom.”

Next to him was Cecil Coleman, a seventh-grader at Haile Middle who after holding a cowfish said, “It was really slimy. It tried to get away while I was holding it.”

Stevely can still remember the first festival when about 1,000 people turned out for what was then a President’s Day event.

“There were a bunch of fishermen sitting around drinking coffee trying to figure out how we could tell the story of Cortez and the fishing industry to the general public,” he recalled.

After a few years, organizers decided to expand the festival by making it a two-day weekend event. Not coincidentally, the crowds and participants grew as well.

“We finally figured there were too many people working on President’s Day,” Stevely said.

While this year’s profits were not known at press time, they are welcome at one of the most opportunistic times. FISH purchased a parcel of land last year as part of its 100-acre mangrove wetland habitat along the Sarasota Bay shoreline.

This story was originally published February 18, 2018 at 7:44 PM with the headline "Visitors find food, fun and fellowship at old-time fishing village of Cortez."