Yarr! In September each year a Pirate Festival is held in Port Adelaide to coincide with the world-wide celebrations of International Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th.

Over a weekend the Pirates of Port Adelaide take matters into their own hands and invite pirates from near and far, young and old, scurvy and scarred to invade Port Adelaide and party with them. The 2017 Pirate Festival will be held over the weekend 23 & 24 September.

Our aims: to capture the imagination and invite all to get involved in the ocean of possibilities for Piratey fun in Port Adelaide and to break the Guinness World Record for a gathering of pirates – currently 14,231 in Hastings UK on 22 July 2012.

In case you haven’t noticed, Port Adelaide is THE place to be if you’re a pirate. It has two Tall Ships and lots of hidden treasure. It’s also the perfect place for kids to imagine the thrill of adventures on the high seas and for families to dress up and unleash their inner pirate.

There will be a free children’s Treasure Hunt, complete with map and clues, guaranteed to be entertaining and to tire them out. As they follow the map they will find themselves exploring Port Adelaide, its attractions, businesses, laneways, pop-up pirate events and hidden treasure.

We know that adults like to dress up too and an after-dark Scavenger Hunt uses smart phone technology to lead adults around the many pubs and bars to complete challenges and collect doubloons - this will be thirsty work.

It will be the biggest pirate gathering in the southern hemisphere and you and your parrot should be there. We’re counting on it!

The Pirates of Port Adelaide Festival is a free family event, follow our Facebook page for news on this year's event when the Jolly Rogers will be flying high and the Port will be made shipshape for the onslaught. Avast and Ahoy Me Hearties, The Pirates of Port Adelaide will welcome ye!

https://www.facebook.com/PiratesofPortAdelaide/

A world record–breaking attendance target needs lots of marketing and promotion and that costs many gold doubloons!

Courier Parrots, town criers and notice boards all require their palms to be crossed with these pieces of eight in order to deliver the message. Your pledge will help us with these costs and enable us to reach pirates who are near and far, rich and poor, scurvy and scarred to break the Guinness World Records and experience the joy and adventure of thousands of pirates gathering in one fantastic place for a mighty Yarr!

Whilst there be many pirate kin throughout the city and suburbs, they be scattered widely making delivering the bottled messages a large and costly exercise. No wanna-be (or real) pirate wants a soggy letter, so we need to drink thousands of bottles o’ rum to have enough empties fer the message.  We would normally throw our bottles into the sea but here be no time to wait for them t’ drift ashore and be found. So, we drew a trusty map fer the message t’ be found. 

Your pledge will enable us to deliver the bottles with the message to meet on September 23rd and be counted!

It’s not often a whole city gets involved in ‘make-believe’ to foster healthy imaginations but it does for one weekend in September and you can be a big part of making it truly fantastical!