The 1st Annual Homer Halibut Tournament, that was rescheduled from the first weekend in June to the final weekend in September, has been canceled.
Brad Anderson, Executive Director for the Homer Chamber of Commerce & Visitor Center spoke to KSRM:
“This is the first year of it so we’re trying to get it off the ground for the first year and the timing in June just didn’t work. People still thought it was the summer-long derby, not a two-day tournament. We had to delay our winter kings so the time between that and April and this, the timing just didn’t work to it then so we decided to shift it to September of this year so we can still have it within the season. We didn’t realize, at the time, how much a conflict that was going to be with hunting season. A number of people who would normally participate going, ‘No I’m hunting, I can’t participate.’ The charters are also, they’re all shutting down this year right after Labor Day. They’re just exhausted, tired. So we won’t have the charter businesses there to help take people out. It just became a situation of probably not enough people able to do the event to make it viable at that time of year. We decided to go ahead and postpone that and regroup and develop new plans for next year.”
The tentative plan is to have the event on the first weekend of June 2022.
Anderson spoke on if COVID-19 was a factor:
“No, it really wasn’t about that. When we decided to make this, it was for, COVID was really becoming an impact. Fortunately, this kind of event, you’re out on the water and it would have been more of a COVID-friendly type of an event to do. We may have had to adjust the event element but COVID wasn’t the decision for this. It was really trying to make it so enough people would participate to make it the style of tournament that we like to do.”
This version of the halibut tournament would have been a two-day fishing tournament to see who can pull in the biggest halibut and come home with the jackpot.
