The oldest festival in Nova Scotia is just around the corner and excitement is building in Yarmouth.

Seafest starts this weekend.

President Darryl LeBlanc tells our newsroom; there will be many activities to look forward to.

“One of the big events that is tried, tested and true, is the mackerel toss. Well, it’s the herring toss now because of the moratorium on mackerel,” says LeBlanc.

He says both adults and children can participate in that and it’s pretty popular.

LeBlanc tell us, they used to have events in the water such as “rum running” but because of insurance purposes, those became difficult to maintain.

Now, events are on land.

Scaled back

Seafest started in 1979 and used to be a 12-day event.

Now, LeBlanc says, it’s been scaled back to six days – mostly due to the lack of government funding and resources.

“We normally had two students that we hired for summer to certainly help with this. Those were not approved this year, so we’re basically doing this all on volunteers,” says LeBlanc.

He adds, 12-day events seem to be dying out so Seafest will likely stay somewhere around four to six days.

“What I’d like to see is just people come and participate in the events that we do have. I’ve always said to the team…there’s two things you can’t control. You can’t control the weather, and you can’t control people showing up,” adds LeBlanc.

He says they’ve been fortunate every year for both and it’s “really all you can ask for”.

Seafest is July 12-17.