Parksville's famous Summer by the Sea market on Craig St., seen here from 2019, has been scrapped for the summer in favour of a scaled back twice-weekly event. (Alex Rawnsley/NanaimoNewsNOW)

By Alex Rawnsley

SUMMER BY THE SEA

Summer by the Sea market scaled back to meet COVID-19 landscape

Jun 4, 2020 | 5:03 PM

PARKSVILLE — A staple of summer in the Oceanside region will look vastly different this year.

The weekly ‘Summer by the Sea’ market on Craig St. was scrapped in order to comply with COVID-19-related health orders about crowd size and proximity.

Instead, beginning June 30 the Parksville Chamber of Commerce will host a series of smaller markets every Tuesday and Thursday from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. outside its office at the south end of the city.

“We felt a little bit of an obligation to see if we could find a way through not having 2,500 people crammed into a very small space, because obviously that was never going to work under the current environment,” Kim Burden, Parksville Chamber of Commerce CEO, told NanaimoNewsNOW.

The market will be limited to 20 vendors at a time with a different roster each week. Entrances and exits will be carefully managed in a similar fashion to other markets in the region.

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Burden said postponing or cancelling the market, similar to the decision made by the Nanaimo night market, was never under consideration.

He also said they’re prepared to expand the market to more nights as vendors sign on.

“We’re not prepared to go beyond the 20 vendors at any given time. We’re currently full in terms of the vendors who have registered…as we accumulate more folks and we get to a place where we get 15 to 20 (vendors interested) then we’ll open another night up.”

The Parksville Chamber of Commerce office is at 1275 Island Hwy.

alex.rawnsley@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @alexrawnsley