By Delayna Earley
The Island News
The sun has set on the 67th Annual Beaufort Water Festival.
The stage has been taken down and packed up, there are no longer any metal fences in downtown Beaufort and the more than 400 volunteers that participated in this year’s 10-day long festival have all returned to their normal lives and jobs.
In September, planning will begin on next year’s festival.
Josh Schott, the newly announced commodore of the 68th Water Festival, is looking forward to getting started with the planning for next year but is also taking the month of August to just spend time with his family.
Schott, a Beaufort native, has been married to his wife, Brooke, for 18 years.
They have two children, Ava, 15, and Joshua, 20.
Ava, who is a rising sophomore at Beaufort High School, was a Pirette during the 2023 festival.
Schott works for Dominion Power and began volunteering with the Beaufort Water Festival in 2001 according to the Water Festival’s website.
“I used to just go down and help where I was needed. Just odds and ends here and there,” Schott said about the first years that he volunteered. “Then I fully committed to volunteering in 2012.”
This past year, he fulfilled the role of Program Coordinator and was essentially the right-hand man to 67th Commodore James Nutt.
Nutt and Schott have been volunteering together for years, and according to Nutt, Schott seems to follow in his footsteps with the positions and work that he has done with the Water Festival.
“James and I have always worked together on different things, but my first year as a coordinator in 2015, I was the Water and Air Coordinator and James was the Water and Air Coordinator the year before me,” Schott said.
Schott follows in another set of footsteps as well – his dad, Wilmot Schott, was also named Commodore in 2009.
“It’s a good community event,” Schott said. “I enjoyed it as a kid and now I see my kids enjoy it.”
When asked about what he hopes to see for the annual festival in the coming year, he said that he mostly wants to see them continue to move in the same direction that this past year’s festival was heading.
“I just hope for a great festival and just continue to build off of the successes from this past year,” Schott said.
Schott said that his favorite event of the week is Opening Ceremonies because you can see all the work that has been put into putting the festival on and there are families out watching the fireworks.
Delayna Earley lives in Beaufort with her husband, two children and Jack Russell. She formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She joined The Island News in 2022. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
