Inaugural Bradley Beach Reggae Festival at the 6th Annual Pirate Day
August 22 @ 2:00 PM – 11:30 PM
Bradley Beach • Saturday, August 22
Pirate Day Meets Reggae Fest, and Somehow It Works
Swashbucklers by noon. Horn sections by evening. That’s the pitch for this year’s Bradley Beach Tourism Commission lineup, and honestly, it shouldn’t work as well as it does. The town’s 6th Annual Pirate Day is folding into something brand new this year, an inaugural reggae festival that turns Riley Park into a two stage outdoor concert once the treasure hunters put their loot away. Same day. Same town. Two completely different energies, and both of them free.
The day starts small and gets louder. From noon to 4:00 PM, the Main Street Treasure Hunt sends kids and families wandering up and down the strip, popping into local shops for candy, trinkets, and whatever counts as pirate booty this year. It’s low key, walkable, and exactly the kind of thing that makes small shore towns worth visiting in the first place.
Then, right as the treasure hunt winds down, the tone flips entirely. At 2:00 PM, reggae takes over Riley Park across two stages, the North Stage and the South Stage Gazebo, trading sets back and forth into the evening. This isn’t a one band, one stage situation either. Four separate acts split the bill, and the whole thing is built to keep moving, so there’s rarely a dead stretch where nothing’s happening on either stage.
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2:00 PM • South Stage Gazebo Shore Steady 4:45 PM • South Stage The Marel Hidalgo Group Jamaican jazz influence, a little different from the rest of the bill |
3:30 PM • North Stage Dub Assassins 6:00 PM • North Stage • Headliner The Verdict |
Riley Park sits right at 615 Main Street, close enough to the boardwalk that you could realistically do the whole day on foot. Bring a chair. Bring a blanket. Bring people who complain when plans change, because this one’s flexible enough to handle latecomers. Nobody’s paying for a ticket, nobody’s fighting for parking near a gate, and nobody needs to pick between the pirates and the music, since one leads straight into the other.
This isn’t a standalone event either. It slots into Bradley Beach’s Saturdays in the Park concert series, which runs most of the summer, but this particular Saturday is the one built to draw a crowd bigger than the usual lawn chair regulars. For the full breakdown straight from the source, the original announcement has more on how the commission put this year’s lineup together.
Pirates in the afternoon. Reggae until dark. Bradley Beach isn’t picking a lane this August, and that’s the whole appeal.
