Family-Friendly Skimmer Festival Draws Thousands to Sea Isle City

By Donald Wittkowski Having just one budding Picasso in the family is something special. Having three is, well, truly extraordinary. Using bold brush strokes, triplets Ava, Avery and Alyssa were splashing bright colors onto a canvas to create their own masterpieces under the watchful eye of their parents, Allison and Wes Rhoa, of Horsham, Pa. “They’re a regular Picasso,” exclaimed Linda Layton, a Sea Isle City resident who is the triplets’ grandmother. The setting for these precocious 4-year-old painters to express their creativity was the “Art Bar,” a new attraction at Sea Isle’s annual Skimmer Festival weekend. Allison Rhoa said the “Art Bar” is just the type of kid-friendly entertainment that keeps her family coming back to the Skimmer Festival year after year. “They have so much fun together. There’s so much for them to do, like face-painting and dancing. They also love the arts and crafts,” Rhoa said of her daughters, who are identical triplets. Carefully trying to manipulate the paint brushes in their tiny hands, the triplets were all concentrating on their own works of art. “Thumbs up. I love it,” declared Avery while she was in the midst of creating a superhero painting. The Rhoa family was part of a crowd numbering in the thousands Saturday for the opening day of the Skimmer Festival, Sea Isle’s biggest summer event. The festival continues Sunday with an antique car show on the oceanfront Promenade. “We expect that tens of thousands of people will come to the festival for the weekend,” city spokeswoman Katherine Custer said. “We definitely have an impressive crowd.” Crowds line the oceanfront Promenade to check out the 330 vendors selling an array of things from their tents. The festival traces its roots to the early 1960s. After a monstrous storm in 1962 devastated the Jersey Shore, the townsfolk in Sea Isle hoped to persuade tourists a year later that the beach community was in recovery mode and ready to begin welcoming visitors again. They needed a big event to attract the crowds, so they created the Skimmer Festival in 1963, an old-fashioned celebration whose name was inspired by the Victorian-era straw hats worn by boaters during more genteel times. All these years later, the event continues to be a huge draw. It kicks off what Sea Isle officials and the local business community hope will be a busy and profitable summer vacation season. “People really look forward to it. For many, many people, this is the official start of the summer season,” said Custer, who credited the city’s Division of Tourism for doing a stellar job of organizing the festival. Combining kiddie amusements with a sprawling outdoor food court and 330 vendors lining the Promenade, the festival is overwhelmingly popular with families. Saturday’s sun-splashed skies and temperatures in the 80s also helped to attract big crowds. Free amusement rides in Excursion Park are a popular family attraction. Excursion Park, the city’s entertainment hub next to the beach, was transformed into a children’s playground of free amusement rides, face-painting, arts and crafts and live music. Skimmer Festival is also a foodies’ paradise that includes hotdogs, hamburgers, crab cakes, French fries, funnel cakes, ice cream and many other seashore favorites. Patty and Glenn Brownhill, of Dennis Township, were munching on hotdogs in the company of their son, Steve Brownhill, and his daughter, Jacklynn, 7, and his son, Chase, 6. Steve Brownhill, who lives in Elkton, Md., said his family attends the Skimmer Festival every year, drawn by a day at the beach, children’s entertainment and mouth-watering food. Yet with such an array of food to choose from, why did the Brownhills settle for simple hotdogs? “It was the shortest line,” Steve Brownhill said, cracking a smile. The Brownhill family attends the Skimmer Festival every year.