Hundreds of spectators lined the St. Croix River on Sunday for Stillwater Harvest Fest's pumpkin regatta, where four paddlers climbed into hollowed-out pumpkins and raced across the water — some of them hefting several hundred pounds of gourd beneath them.
The event, now in its 21st year as part of the Stillwater Harvest Fest, began two decades ago as a simple pumpkin weigh-off before organizers started letting growers paddle their giant squash across Lowell Park's waterfront. This year's largest entry weighed 2,305 pounds — short of the roughly 1,800-pound pumpkin that set a world record for heaviest racing pumpkin at the same festival back in 2010, but still enough to need a forklift to reach the water.
Stillwater native Tim Brown won for the third time, beating his cousin and fellow competitor Matthew Schmidt to the finish. "I think the first time I won was in 2016, so to be able to do it in my mid-40s is pretty cool," Brown said. "Happy to beat my cousin — that's the biggest goal." He added that paddling a pumpkin is harder than it looks: "It's not as easy as it looks. Who would've thought a pumpkin could float and be paddled?"
The four-boat field also included Laura Fairchild, a first-time racer who competed in memory of her son, Justin Ross Fairchild, a U.S. Army veteran who died in 2007. Cassie McLemore, director of events for the festival's organizing nonprofit, credited the St. Croix Growers Association's community of growers — who save and swap seeds year after year — for the steadily bulking field. "It has a really robust group of growers that have been doing it a long time," she said.
Organizers handed out seeds scooped from the race pumpkins to spectators willing to try growing their own giant gourd for next year, keeping the regatta's unlikely supply chain of thousand-pound boats running for another season. The festival has grown into a two-day affair with live music, food trucks and vendors, but the sight of grown adults white-knuckling their way across a river in a vegetable remains the main draw.