The LCEC Stone Crab Music Fest runs 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday, November 8, in the Winn Dixie Plaza at 9940 Stringfellow Road in St. James City. Five dollars at the entrance, asked as a donation rather than charged as a ticket. Proceeds go to businesses and not-for-profit organizations on Pine Island. Those details come off the Greater Pine Island Chamber of Commerce page for the event, which is the only place I would trust them from this far out.
We are a member of that chamber. We are not a vendor at this one, and nothing below is the chamber speaking or the organizers speaking. It is the published schedule, two facts from the state, and my own notes from working events on that island.
Four acts, two hours each, straight through
- 11 a.m. — MattLee Crew
- 1 p.m. — CJ Sterlace
- 3 p.m. — Frank Bang & the Secret Stash
- 5 p.m. — RJ Howson
An eight-hour festival with four two-hour music blocks tells you how the day is shaped before you ever get there. The 11 a.m. block is the family block. The 5 p.m. block is not, and it is not meant to be.
If you have a four-year-old, you are arriving at 11 and you are driving home by 1:30, which is also the only way you will see the vendor tables while the vendors still have anything on them. If your kids are twelve and up, the back half of the afternoon is the better half, and 3 p.m. is when a Chicago blues guitarist is going to be the loudest thing on that lot.
Three and a half weeks into the season
Florida’s stone crab harvest season opened October 15 and closes May 1, with the closure taking effect May 2. That is the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, not a restaurant menu. November 8 lands three and a half weeks into a season that runs about six and a half months, so the claws at this festival are near the front of the supply, not the back of it.
The other FWC number worth knowing is the minimum claw size: 2 7/8 inches. That single measurement is most of the reason a stone crab claw costs what it costs. It is a claw-only fishery, the crab goes back in the water, and the legal size floor means a trapper throws back a great deal of what comes up.
Buying it on Pine Island in the first month of the season, from people working water you can see from the plaza, is a different transaction than buying it in April somewhere with a view. That is the actual reason to make the drive, and it has nothing to do with the music.
The hour of this festival most people will not plan for
Clocks fell back on November 1. Sunset on Pine Island on November 8 is 5:42 p.m. The festival runs until 7.
So the last hour and change of this event happens in a dark parking lot, lit by whatever the organizers and the plaza have put up. I wrote about what the November time change does to evening light around here and this is a clean example of it. Before the clocks changed, a 7 p.m. close in late October still had usable dusk light to work with. This one does not.
Practical consequences, in the order they will bite you:
- Find your car in the light. A plaza lot with a festival in it has no row markers you can read at 6:45 p.m. Note the end you came in from.
- Mosquitoes arrive before full dark, not after. St. James City is at the south end of the island with mangrove on both sides. The window from about 5:15 to 6:30 is the one that matters.
- It gets cool now. Fort Myers records put the first 60-degree morning around October 28, and evenings have started following. A long-sleeve layer in the car for a 6 p.m. departure is not overthinking it.
What is on either side of it on the calendar
This is the back half of a two-day weekend worth knowing about. Saturday, November 7, the City of Cape Coral runs its Veterans Day parade down Cape Coral Parkway at 11 a.m., with staging from 9. Veterans Day itself is the following Wednesday, November 11, and Lee County schools have it as a student day off.
Which means a family in the Cape can do the parade Saturday morning, the island Sunday midday, and still have a weekday off coming four days later. If you are the person in your house who schedules things, that is a usable shape. If you are a group looking at a date for your own event, November 7 and November 8 are both spoken for in this county.
A plaza parking lot, which is the detail I actually notice
I read venues for a living, and the first thing I register about this one is that it is asphalt.
That is fine for a music festival. For anybody on Pine Island looking at that same plaza, or a church lot, or a school lot, for an event of their own, asphalt changes the whole setup conversation. A bounce house on grass gets staked. A bounce house on asphalt gets ballasted, which means a sandbag or a water barrel at every single anchor point, hauled in and hauled out, with nothing driven into the surface. On a hard-surface day a real share of what is in my trailer is ballast rather than inflatable.
The second asphalt problem is temperature. A black lot in Southwest Florida in the early afternoon runs far hotter than the air, and the vinyl floor of an inflatable sitting on it picks that up. On a November Sunday that is survivable. In May it is the whole reason to move the setup onto grass or into shade, or to shift the event earlier.
The third is power. Plaza exterior receptacles are usually shared with signage, coolers, or an irrigation controller. A blower wants its own 15- or 20-amp circuit and will trip a breaker it is sharing with a beer cooler at the worst possible moment.
If your island group is looking at a date
Pine Island runs on its own calendar and its own volunteer base, and the events out there that work tend to be run by people who have run them nine times before. If your church, school, or civic group on the island is working on a day of your own this winter, the honest version of my advice is this.
Pick the surface first, then the attraction. On grass, a 14-foot castle at $199 covers six to eight riders ages three to twelve and is the simplest thing I rent. On asphalt, the same unit is the same price and twice the setup. For a crowd rather than a party, the straight obstacle course at $449 or the World’s Largest Twister at $399 move far more bodies per hour than a bounce house will, because a queue for a race clears and a queue for a bounce house does not.
Second, decide who is standing at it. A drop-off rental means we deliver, anchor, walk your people through the blower and the shutdown, and leave. From that moment it is your volunteers. One attendant for the whole public window plus somebody to spell them is two people off your roster. If the roster is already thin, run the day without the inflatable rather than pull two bodies off the kitchen.
Third, remember the obvious thing about an island: everything you bring has to come over one road and go back the same way, and so does every delivery truck, including mine. Load-out on a 7 p.m. close is a dark load-out.
We cover the island — Bokeelia, Pine Island Center, Matlacha, and St. James City — and the drive out is on our own dime, not yours to solve. If you are putting something together out there and want a straight answer on whether a given lot will take a given unit, call or text (239) 212-0011 and describe the surface. That is the first question I am going to ask you anyway.
About the author
Gabriel Denny — Owner, SWFL Amusements LLC
Gabe owns SWFL Amusements. He spent 20+ years in the Air Force, first enlisting after high school before commissioning and retiring as a Major. He is a 5x CFO, which he continues to do when not working bounce houses. He lives in NW Cape Coral, runs events with his two sons, and answers the company phone himself, including at 2am.