The Creekside Music and Arts Festival scheduled for this weekend–Oct. 4 and 5–at Princess Place Preserve in Flagler County is being rescheduled to February due to an inclement forecast of lightning and storms ahead.
“We’ve got to undo a lot of work,” David Ayres, president of Flagler Broadcasting, which produces the annual festival, said late this morning. He was at Princess Place. It was a beautiful day, tents were already being set up, as was the performance stage, but it’s all coming down.
The festival, the largest cultural festival on the county’s calendar, both in attendance and vendors, is rescheduled to February 7 and 8. It is the second time in eight years that the festival has had to be postponed due to weather. In 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, it was moved to November.
The National Weather Service in Jacksonville is predicting showers and thunderstorms increasing from Thursday through Monday in the region, with “multiple rounds of heavy downpours and isolated embedded thunderstorms,” and “localized flooding possible at coastal and low-lying locations.” Princess Place, whose lush greenery sprawls around the Pellicer Creek watershed, is one of those low-lying areas. The storms will be adding to days of rains that have already saturated the ground.
The rainy weather will develop even as Hurricanes Imelda and Humberto are moving northeast, far from the Florida Peninsula, which they never directly threatened even as they sealed the eastern seaboard.
For Flagler Broadcasting, the immediate job is to inform the 100-some vendors of the postponement, along with the many charities that were to benefit from a large portion of the proceeds. To Ayres, it was a necessary call: “It’s dangerous, there’s no way we’d put our vendors and festival goers” at risk, he said, “we want them to come out for a positive experience. Feel confident we’ve made the right move.”
Ayres said he may consider moving the festival permanently to February. “But then again you can get bad weather in February, it’s kind of like a moving target.”
For the past two decades–this year’s was to be the 21st edition–the Creekside Festival, as it was originally called, has featured musicians, crafts, a large variety of food, beer and wine, historians and history, and other cultural acts and displays in the county’s largest natural and protected setting. The festival was the creation of the chamber of commerce. It was acquired by Flagler Broadcasting a few years ago, after that chamber dissolved.
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