Another one down: 69th Beaufort Water Festival comes to a close 

By Delayna Earley

The Island News

After 10 days of festival fun, the 69th Beaufort Water Festival has come to a close and a new Commodore has been named for the 2026 Beaufort Water Festival.

Dusty Vickers, who lives in Port Royal with his wife and two children, will be the new Water Festival Commodore, taking over tor Todd Stowe.

Vickers, who has worked and volunteered for the festival for about 14 years, said that as much as he loves volunteering with the festival, both he and his wife are looking forward to everything that his swan song year with the festival will have to offer before he will take a less active role and can focus on spending that extra time with his wife and two young children.

While Vickers is not sure about what the 70th Beaufort Water Festival will bring, he said he hopes to make his mark and maybe even add a new sporting event that he is trying to figure out logistically.

The 2025 Water Festival had a lot to contend with, between the City of Beaufort closing a large portion of the promenade barely two weeks before the festival’s start forcing staff to find alternative options for several events and heavy rain causing the Opening Night festivities to have to be canceled on that first Friday and rescheduled for later in the week.

The biggest change was moving the Raft Races from the day dock at Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park to the Sands Beach in the town of Port Royal.

Vickers said that moving the event was a positive move and allowed for quicker turnaround in between races.

“They finished two hours earlier this year than they typically do when the event is held at Waterfront Park,” Vickers said.

As a resident of Port Royal, Vickers said he was happy to have an event bring the town into the mix instead of holding everything within Beaufort’s city limits.

Stowe said that overall, he thinks that his staff and the volunteers pulled off a fantastic Water Festival.

“[I’m] still processing it all, but I’m very happy with the bands this year,” said Stowe about the highlights of this year’s Water Festival. “We put a lot of thought and work into selecting them and it seemed to pay off.”

Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.

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