Sunday's 63rd annual Blessing of the Fleet marked the culmination of the four-day Portuguese Festival. On the wharf and in the streets, costumed dancers, wearing the dress of their native villages in Portugal, twirled, sashayed and sang to the accompaniment of musicians playing ukuleles, tiny steel banjos, 15-string guitars called violas, multitudes of individually shaped mandolins, and the strangest percussion instrument of all time, kind of an umbrella made of tiny knit figures that touched their toes and clapped bottle caps as the musician pumped the handle.
But the real focus was the fishing vessels. Many in the crowd remembered back 40 years ago when Provincetown was mainly a fishing port and a tourist destination, and not a tourist spot that happens to have fishermen. Pairs of children and adults in the procession carried banners, each stitched with the names of fishing vessels like Jimmy boy, Stella, the Kathie-Jo. The banner was all that remained of some of them, as restrictive fishing regulations and the collapse of fish stocks have taken their toll on the fleet.
Still, traditions die hard, and the big Provincetown II ferry listed as the crowd on deck shifted to the seaward side of the boat to watch Monsignor Perry bless the boats from the top deck as they paraded by.
Read the complete story at The South Coast Today.