Jerome Young, executive director of the Florida Keys Commercial Fisherman’s Association, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the Florida Keys Seafood Festival.
The festival will be held February 14 and 15 at the Truman Waterfront Park.
Young said, “Everything that we have is fresh from Florida. It’s all commercial fishermen cooking. That’s how it kind of started out. It’s almost like a backyard Seafood Festival. Everyone has been doing it for 20 years. Most everyone there that’s cooking has been cooking the same thing. So we’ve got it down pretty good. Everything that we do serve is from Florida, and we catch most of it.”
Saturday will be from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday will be from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Young said, “We’ve got a bunch of different local bands that are going to be playing. It’s a lot of hard work and a lot of dedicated fishermen. We’ve been around a long time, and we’re kind of getting pushed out of the Keys. It’s becoming unaffordable. A lot of fishermen are older and retiring. There’s not many coming to replace us, so we’re trying to hang on best we can.”
Attendance of the festival could be as high as 10,000 people.
Young said, “We get a lot of especially now that we’re down at the Truman Waterfront, we get a lot of traffic from the cruise ships that are coming through, but we do get a lot of locals as well. And I get phone calls all year long from people all over the country wanting to come and asking questions about it. You can go to our website and you can apply to be a sponsor or a vendor. We do have a lot of locals that promote and help us with our all of our expenses, just simple things like providing the rum, things like that that really help us out and propane for our cooking and fuel for generators, etcetera. So we do appreciate that.”
The Florida Keys Commercial Fisherman’s Association is a non-profit organization.
Young said, “We provide scholarships with the money that we do get, and also whatever money that we have left over from that we use to travel around to represent the fishermen and the Keys at the state and the federal level. We’ve also got lobbyists in DC that help us with all our federal issues.”
The family fishing businesses really need help in competing with the bigger companies.
Young said, “It’s true. We’re struggling this year, especially a lot of tariffs have hurt us, and then there’s a lot of imports that come in that are with no duty, so are very hard to compete with those prices. So we’re working on that. Some people listen. Some people don’t, but that’s why we’re here, to make sure we’re up in their face and let them know what our troubles are. And we are making some some headway, but it’s a slog every day.”
For more information, click here: https://www.floridakeysseafoodfestival.com