A Weekend of Events to Elevate, Educate, and Entertain

by Sarah Reith

KelpFest! is back, examing the story of kelp through the lens of art, science, food, film, and this year, even a parade. From October 3-6, anything that happens anywhere on the Mendocino Coast will be all about kelp.

Why October, when this annual algae is at the end of its life cycle? “Last year, we held KelpFest! in the spring, at a time of birth and renewal,” explains Tristin Anoush McHugh, Kelp Project Director at The Nature Conservancy. “This year, we wanted to celebrate the senescence of the forest.” That’s when the seaweed ends its annual life cycle and dies, then washes onto the shore and attracts insects, which provide a feast for migrating birds.

In the last ten years, bull kelp forests have been devastated due to warm water and the loss of predators that control the herbivorous purple urchin. An astounding 96% of the underwater canopy along 350 kilometers of California’s north coast has vanished.

But kelp is having a cultural resurgence. From Indigenous food sovereignty to academia to economic planning initiatives, a wide coalition is working to restore this keystone species. KelpFest! is a celebration of their efforts.

The festival kicks off on Friday, October 3. The first Friday of the month is always an opportunity to tour galleries, meet artists, and see what’s new in the art world. Local galleries have been gearing up for months to offer kelp and ocean-themed exhibits.

From 4:00-6:00pm on Friday, October 3 at the Fort Bragg Town Hall on the corner of Laurel and Main streets, the public will also have a chance to learn about the art and science of aquaculture.

“I’m excited about it,” says Jami Miller, who came to Fort Bragg in 2023 as the California Sea Grant fellow working with the City of Fort Bragg on the Blue Economy—a plan to use ocean resources for sustainable economic growth. Miller is part of a team that is working on an aquaculture feasibility study. The project includes raising three species of shellfish and installing water quality sensors in promising locations, as well as monitoring three baskets of red abalone, purple urchin, and Pacific oysters at the Noyo Center Marine Field Station on North Harbor Drive. Another basket of Pacific oysters is closer to the mouth of the river, near the wharf. The project also aims to plant bull kelp in the water.

This event will include presentations from everyone who has been involved in the plan. Exhibits offering more information will be at Town Hall all weekend, along with posters by high school students who took part in a Blue Economy youth leadership pilot program.

Kids with kelp facepaint at KelpFest! 2024

The fun continues on Saturday, October 4. You can never have too many people in a parade! Flockworks, an arts and cultural education program, is coordinating the procession. They have been organizing after-school workshops for kids to design costumes, as well as developing a kelp curriculum for Mendocino schools. Participants will gather at the entrance to Portuguese Beach at 11:30am, then march across town to the Mendocino Arts Center for further kelp-related arts and revelry. “It won’t just be kids dressed up as seaweed,” promises Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed and co-director of Above/Below, an organization working to promote ocean literacy.”

That evening, the Mendocino Arts Center will host a Senescence celebration where leaders involved in kelp restoration will speak about their work. This will also be the opening of Mómim Wené, an exhibition of Indigenous arts that honor the sea.

Sunday will be a big day for science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The second annual Indigenous Food Festival will be from 10:00am-4:00pm at Xa Kako Dile: in Caspar. Local and visiting tribal communities will offer samples of foods prepared according to ancient practices, collectively referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). An Indigenous Market will feature an array of traditional arts, like beadwork, basketry, and jewelry.

One of the organizers is Monique Sonoquie (Tongva, Chumash), who has long been involved with local cultural and environmental education. She’s “a little concerned” about the kelp scarcity she’s noticed over the last two years. But she wants people to know that there are ways to take what you need from the sea without depleting it.

Sonoquie sees the Indigenous Food Festival as an opportunity to inform participants about the cultural protocols involved with providing sustainable food. “You gather as much as you need,” she explains, not as much as you can. “You make an offering and establish a relationship with the seaweed.” She hopes visitors will get a taste of what humans and nature can do when they work together, for mutual benefit.

Kelp research and recovery efforts are underway at multiple study sites in the Fort Bragg/Mendocino area, to protect and expand remnant forests. On Sunday morning, visitors to Big River can enjoy a demonstration of the high-tech drone mapping techniques that are being used to monitor the area. “We hope to see more kelp than we did last year,” says McHugh.

There will also be an open house at the Noyo Center Marine Field Station. Visitors can tour the urchin ranch, a 40-foot shipping container where overabundant yet starving purple urchins have been fed in a recirculating aquaculture system to prepare them for market. These resilient creatures are able to persist through years of starvation, but there is hope in Blue Economy circles that they can be harvested, raised to delectable plumpness, and sold commercially.

From 11:30am-12:45pm on Sunday, the Field Station will also host a presentation from Kelp Rises, a multi-institutional research program investigating both the human and natural drivers of kelp system resilience. Later that afternoon a panel discussion will dive deeper into the topic of regenerative aquaculture. A reception with kelp featured prominently among the selection of tasty hors d’oeuvres will follow.

The final event will be a wild urchin harvest by the light of the full moon, led by Nathan Maxwell Cann. Eating the urchin that are eating the kelp is “a great way to capstone the event ... a parting connection with the kelp forest,” he says.

Like the kelp ecosystem, KelpFest! is vast and complex. Iselin says that during the planning, “Every time an idea came up, someone said yes. It really was a lesson in the power of yes.”

Find a detailed schedule of events and more information at:
northcoastkelpfest.org

Photos by Underwater Pat.