Pumpkin contest on after virus squashes Half Moon Bay festival
The 50th annual Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival was canceled by COVID, but you cannot explain that to a pumpkin in the business of growing 50 pounds a day on the vine.
So the famous pumpkin weighoff will happen as always early Monday morning, with its full cash prize offered.
The $ 7 a pound for the winner ( plus perhaps $ 30,000 for a world record) make the Half Moon Bay weighin the Wimbledon of pumpkin fests, as measured by prize money. Growers were driving in Sunday from as far as Wisconsin — 50 of them — each with a single pumpkin in the bed of a pickup, except for showoffs who use a trailer.
The weighin goes on, but like other spectator events this year, the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin WeighOff will not have its usual dedicated audience — about 500 fans — to build excitement.
“If you kicked out Christmas, Halloween would be the No. 1 event of the year, no doubt about it,” said Napa farmer Gary L. Miller, 73, the West Coast representative of an august body called the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth.
“This year’s weighoff is more important than ever. Pumpkins put smiles on people’s faces.”
Miller’s own smile inducer was grown adjacent to his 3acre vineyard of Cabernet grapes. Neither has had a good season, but the heat and smoke are easier on pumpkins.
“The ash falling out of the sky every other day has been horrible for the wine industry,” he said. “With pumpkins, I’m not selling a taste. I’m selling something that will turn your head.”
A perennial top 10 finisher, Miller last won in 2013 with a pumpkin weighing 1,985 pounds, then just 30 pounds off the world record.
Since then pumpkins have gotten 10% bigger, said Miller. The current world record of 2,624 pounds was set by a German gourd.
Miller picked out his candidate back in June and cut back other pumpkins in competition with it.
“If you send all the energy into one pumpkin, it will definitely grow faster than if you send it into two or three,” Miller said Sunday morning, after harvesting it by sawing a stock as thick as a small tree trunk and hoisting with a 2ton jack into the bed of his heavy duty Chevy.
On his Sunday drive down Highway 29, across the Golden Gate Bridge and down Highway 1, he expected the usual caravan of photo bombers. “They always pull up alongside and yell, ‘ What does it weigh?’ ” said Miller, who uses his own language of hand signals to answer. “Some understand it and some don’t.”
Half Moon Bay, known as the Pumpkin Capital of the World, or Pumpkintown for short, turns out to be a great place for weighing pumpkins — but not for growing giant ones. They don’t like the fog and they don’t like the wind.
Last year’s winner was Leonardo Urena, also from Napa, with a pumpkin close to 2,175 pounds, earning him $ 15,220, plus $ 1,000 for breaking a state record.
In the Coastside pumpkins category, Half Moon Bay’s John Muller — the Pumpkin Professor, or Farmer John to locals — won with 881 pounds.
But the big names have to make an overnight trip of it, congregating Sunday at the Aristocrat Hotel on Highway 1. While standing guard to make sure none of the contestants are stolen, the farmers handicap the top five just by looking at and tapping the gourds. If it sounds like a drum, it lacks thickness of skin. If it does not vibrate at all, it is thickskinned and heavy.
“We can guess within 100 pounds what they will weigh,” said Miller, who knows weights. He recalled his birth weight was 9 ¼ pounds, maybe a record for 1946.
Miller usually works the circuit, entering pumpkin contests in Placerville, Santa Rosa, Elk Grove and a half dozen other places. Most were canceled this year, but Half Moon Bay goes on.
“The Half Moon Bay weighoff is known worldwide,” Miller said. “I had people calling me from Japan when I won.”
Promoters call it the Super Bowl of WeighOffs. The pumpkin festival, which runs the weekend after Columbus Day, usually draws up to 250,000 for a Saturday parade down Main Street with marching bands and a grand marshal, though the main attraction is the grand champion, which travels on its own float as the winning grower and family wave to the throngs.
The downtown festival is its own mini economy, raising about $ 500,000 for 35 nonprofit groups. Safeway sponsors the weighoff. Joe Cotchett, an attorney and real estate investor, donated $ 200,000, plus another $ 100,000 in PPP ( Pumpkin Power Project) matching funds.
Top pumpkins normally stay in town for a week of glory, then head home, often creating another frenzy on freeways.
“I have merchants lined up wanting this pumpkin,” Miller said. “Can you imagine a storefront anywhere in the universe with a 2,000pound pumpkin sitting in front?
“It’s bigger than a billboard.”
“This year’s weighoff is more important than ever. Pumpkins put smiles on people’s faces.” Gary L. Miller, Napa farmer