Tilapia Fest expands for 2004
It is shaping up as a major feature of the Belize District’s entertainment calendar, bringing hundreds of visitors to the picturesque village. It’s time for the annual Crooked Tree Tilapia Fest, and organiser Kenneth Bruce says the massive support the event received in its inaugural run last year has prompted some expansion.
Kenneth Bruce, Organizer, Tilapia Fest
“We have it due to the amount of Tilapia that we started to catch in the lagoon. And sometimes you would take a haul and you only catch like one bay snook and five hundred pounds of Tilapia. So we decided to have this Tilapia Fest; and this is the second year we’re having it.”
“Last year was one day, this year we’re planning to have it two days, the twenty-seventh and the twenty-eighth. The best part about the Tilapia Fest is the swinging of the net to show the people how you catch the fish. And the same fish that we catch in the swinging of the net, we sell it there for maybe one-fifty or a dollar a pound, you know?”
“Well apart from the swinging of the net we’ll have first prize for who shoot the biggest Tilapia, that will be something like twenty-five dollars, then we’ll have female mud wrestling, then we’ll have five-man team dump in the lagoon wrestling, then we will have tug-o-war, beer drinking.”
A dance will also be held on the night of March twenty-seventh featuring the Youth Connection Band. In addition to fish dishes, Bruce says visitors to this year’s Tilapia Fest will have their pick of other local favourites including iguana, bocotora, and hiccatee.
