DAMARISCOTTA, Maine — What else are you going to do with a 1,000-pound pumpkin?
You could drop it 200 feet from a crane into a swimming pool.
You could carve or paint a unique, intricate work of art to line Main Street.
Or you could craft it into a boat — paddleboat or motorboat — and race it through the harbor.
More than 10,000 people surged into downtown Damariscotta this weekend to see that question answered during the annual Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta.
Chelsea Pinkham, whose father, Buzz Pinkham, started the regatta more than a decade ago, dressed as Elsa from the Disney movie “Frozen” before climbing into her pumpkin and paddling across the harbor.
Katy Taylor of Bath floated a bright red lobster pumpkin bearing the Maine Maritime Museum logo, where her craft was built. She laughed as she paddled to a last-place finish in her heat — the pumpkin apparently sat too high in the water — but Taylor was satisfied.
“We learned something,” she said.
“It’s hard work to paddle a pumpkin,” said JaJa Martin of Bremen, wearing a green princess gown as she climbed out of her pumpkin, “Yoda.” “There is no strategy.”
Donning long blond braids and a horned helmet, Russell Orms of Austin, Texas, climbed into a motorized Viking ship created from a 985-pound pumpkin.
Jeff Dutra was only partway through the seven-lap motorboat race when his pumpkin capsized rounding a pumpkin cone, prompting cheers from the crowd and a safety check by the Damariscotta Fire Department boat.
Tim Smith took first place in Monday’s paddleboat finals, with Christian Rioux sailing under the American flag to win the motorboat race.
Eleven years ago, Buzz Pinkham started the regatta sailing a single pumpkin across the water.
“They thought we were crazy,” he said Monday. “But we had two boats the second year … the third year the town got involved, and in 2007, we had the first festival.”
This year’s festival began Oct. 3 when volunteer growers dropped off their pumpkins to be weighed. Throughout the week, festival-goers attended a pumpkin derby, pumpkin pie eating and pumpkin recipe contests, heard street performers and watched as a crane lifted a 1,200-pound pumpkin about 200 feet into the air and dropped it into a swimming pool, and then two more onto cars.
Pinkham estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people lined the streets of downtown Damariscotta for Saturday’s giant pumpkin parade.
The festival brings “a bump” in business to local stores and restaurants, and it prompts many visitors to “stumble on Damariscotta” for the first time, he said.
And here’s the secret to giant gourds, according to Edwin Pierpont, who grew this year’s record-breaking, 1,727-pound pumpkin: Pierpont places mill fabric, from paper mills, underneath the pumpkins when they’re the size of a basketball, then covers the mill fabric with two or three inches of sand. It prevents the pumpkin from rotting, he said. Other than that, it takes “a lot of care, and a lot of fertilizer.”