Fast Feet Take to the Crates at the Maine Lobster Festival

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association and Geary Brewing Company are co-sponsoring the Maine Lobster Festival’s International Great Crate Race on Sunday, August 2. The Maine Lobster Festival takes place in Rockland from July 29 through August 2.

All photos courtesy of the Maine Lobster Festival.

The International Great Crate Race was the invention of Diane and William Atwood, owners of Atwood Lobster in Spruce Head. Back in the 1970s, Diane was looking down at a string of lobster crates in the water at the wharf and wondered how many a person could run across. So Atwood’s sons, David and Sam, nephew Marty Molloy, and other local children took to the water to find out and a lively tradition was born.

After decades of high-spirited competition each summer in Spruce Head, the Maine Lobster Festival took over the contest about twenty years ago. Today the International Great Crate Race is managed by Festival board member Shannon Kinney, who was herself a crate race competitor as a child.

The course is a string of 50 wooden lobster crates stretching across a section of Rockland’s inner harbor next to the Festival. Originally the crates held either lobsters or were empty, but today’s crates are filled with seaweed to help them float.

Each contestant must run across the lobster crates without falling into the water. If the person makes it to the end, he or she then runs back to the start. The race continues until the inevitable dunk in the harbor or exhaustion takes over.

The overall record for the race was set in 2014, when two contestants, Scarlett Flint and Harrison Page, each ran a total of 6,500 crates!