Sea-Swell Festival
The sea swell festival is a celebration of the beginning of spring in the Havock Isles, marked in particular by the mating season of several species of crustacean. Named after the distinctive shapes created by mating Celgar Shrimp on the surface of the water as they swarm, the festival has been a community gathering and time for celebration based around a simple philosophy: There is plenty of food, so eat it before it goes too waste.
The festival is also used as an unofficial reinforcement of the peace treaty between the inhabitants of the Shepherd Isles and the Saughain colony on the reef a mile away.
Execution
The celebration is officially over 3 days, the first catch or first emergence triggering a frantic preparation. Everything caught over first day becomes communal, and supplies of timber and flour are dontated. The mayor puts in a major order for beer and cider too any nearby ship, and children are sent too scour the rock platforms for whelks and abalone.
The second day is the beginning of celebrations proper, and the day is spent cooking and consuming the catches of yesterday, and shooing helm-crabs away from the cooking fires on the beaches. There are careful attempts too make the food as pleasant as possible, and to be the most popular shrimp chef is a small honour. Drunkenness and wildness is common, but quite a few of the villagers will remain sober to ensure fights don't go too far and that drunken swimming doesn't turn into drunken drowining.
On the third day, any food or drink that remains uneaten is put into a boat, and then sent over the top of Whale Bone Reef, where the village of Saughain will eat every single scrap ensuring nothing goes to waste and, if there was enough booze left, making sure that the cordial relationship between the two villages continues.
Components and tools
The festival has few material trappings. Villagers on each island will bring tables or blankets out into the streets, and a communal cooking fire will be set up on the beach. Shrimp, whelks and rock lobsters are roasted over these fires and shared, and helm-crab roe and seabuds are distributed about the crowds. Alcohol, mostly imported is consumed in a great volume, and a salty damper provided by the farmers in the highlands of the isle, is cooked in the ashes.
Generally very little fish or other meats eaten with the over abundance of molluscs, because, at least according to the locals, the fish have their own festival to attend.
The boat used too send offerings to the neighbours is rarely the same boat year and in year out, and to incentivise the fisherman sending it, it will be given a fresh coat of paint once it is returned.
Observance
The celebration usually starts midway through the month of Eo's Walk, and celebration officially begin after the first catch of Celegar Shrimp with blue shells, or when the Black Helm-Crab first begins to climb onto the beaches and lay eggs.
Often these events coincide with a full moon, and if they do not it's a sign of a disturbance in the natural world and dangerous times in the future.
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