OCEAN FEST celebrates Surf City, NC’s wave-riding heritage while providing a fun, free event where everyone can enjoy live music, food, drink, and learn about ways to protect our favorite thing in the world: THE OCEAN.
Ocean Fest returns to downtown Surf City on Saturday, May 2, 2026, with a FREE, all-day beachside celebration.
This beloved coastal event features live music, a vintage surf contest, a 5K beach run, eco education, local vendors, food and drinks, and family-friendly fun—all benefiting Mother Ocean.
Surf
Contest
Ocean Fest is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, tax ID 87-2990341.
The Fest
Annually in May, in the heart of the quaint southern beach town, Surf City, NC, Ocean Fest brings together tens of thousands of festival-goers for a weekend-long celebration of music, art, surfing and coastal culture. Stay tuned for community activation – Give Back Nights with our great partners and POP up events. Be sure to sign up for our email list to be First to Know.
Highlights
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Music festival featuring top-flight touring bands
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Vintage surf experience
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Curated vendor market and eco exhibitors
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Local food trucks and beverage vendors
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Green event: zero plastic, recycling/composting, and strict sustainability requirements
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Kids zone
Our carefully selected bands will keep the energy and music flowing, guaranteeing an unforgettable event. Alongside the electrifying music, enjoy a variety of local vendors, eco exhibits, and food trucks serving up delicious treats! Come have a blast and learn ways to be a better steward of our coastal waters while supporting the award-winning nonprofit Ocean Fest!
The main goal of Ocean Fest is to educate & inspire the local community about ways they can help preserve & protect our marine environment. During the festival, our Eco Zone presented by A New Earth Project will host over a dozen eco-related nonprofit exhibitors on-site to teach festival goers about ocean protection & sustainability.
This ain’t no high-stress, high-performance surf contest! Instead, the Ocean Fest Vintage Surf Contest is a fun & funky retro surf-off in which participants are required to ride vintage mid-length surfboards from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Click above for more info!
Ocean Fest was founded in 2019 by three surfing buddies who can usually be found riding the waves of Surf City, NC. The motivation behind the event was simply to share our love for the ocean, celebrate the pure joy of surfing, and, most importantly, to give something meaningful back to Mother Ocean. With that in mind, Ocean Fest strives to educate the community about ecological threats that exist for our precious marine environments and teach ways we all can better protect those environments. Our motto: “To Surf and Protect.”
Find out all about Ocean Fest and all of the upcoming events at https://www.theoceanfest.org
