Waterfest 2026 Brings Paddling, Indigenous Music, Art and a Community Conversation to Long Pond

Waterfest 2026 brings a full day of paddling, swimming, music, art, environmental learning, and community conversation to Long Pond in Ledyard on Saturday, September 19, with this year’s festival built around a deceptively simple theme: Water Inspires.

The Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed’s free annual gathering takes place at 79 Homestead Road, along a part of the watershed where recreation, Indigenous history, wildlife habitat and some very modern questions about flooding and climate resilience all converge.

The main Waterfest program begins at 10 a.m., with an optional Native-led Lantern Hill hike beginning earlier at 8 a.m. The day’s scheduled activities continue through 4 p.m., followed by event cleanup through 5:30.

And this isn’t a festival where the water merely provides the scenery.

Participants can get onto Long Pond, learn how to keep invasive species from hitching a ride on their boats, paddle toward the site of a proposed fishway, hear Indigenous music and poetry, and participate in discussions about what should happen to this landscape in the future.

Waterfest Is Free for a Reason

The Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed describes Waterfest as one of its two signature free community learning events, along with Springfest.

The organization deliberately mixes environmental education with recreation, arts, food and conversation.

Waterfest isn’t intended to feel like a conference about water.

It’s meant to get people interacting with it.

This year’s “Water Inspires” theme looks at the different ways water can inspire life, creativity, learning, collaboration and movement.

That means swimming and paddling belong beside environmental exhibits. Music and poetry belong beside discussions about flood control. Art belongs beside habitat restoration.

Admission is free, although the Alliance is asking anyone who can contribute to consider making a donation toward the cost of producing Waterfest and its ongoing watershed work.

The Day Can Start on Top of Lantern Hill

For early risers, Waterfest actually begins two hours before the main program.

An optional Native-led hike on Lantern Hill starts at 8 a.m.

Hikers should meet and sign in at the Two Trees Inn parking lot at 7:45 a.m.

Lantern Hill is far more than a convenient place to get a good view.

The quartzite ridge rises dramatically above the surrounding ponds and wetlands and is one of the defining natural landmarks of the upper Mystic River watershed.

The hill and surrounding landscape also carry deep cultural significance for the Mashantucket Pequot people.

Beginning Waterfest there provides a different perspective on everything that follows.

From high ground, water becomes part of a system rather than an isolated pond.

Long Pond Is Near the Top of the Mystic River Watershed

Waterfest’s location helps explain much of the day’s programming.

The Mystic River doesn’t simply begin somewhere near downtown Mystic and flow toward the sea.

Its watershed reaches north through portions of Groton, Stonington, Ledyard and North Stonington, as well as the lands of the Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot Tribal Nations.

In the upper watershed, water flows through a landscape of forested hills, wetlands and ponds around Lantern Hill.

Long Pond is one of the important pieces of that system.

The pond covers roughly 100 acres and reaches a maximum depth of about 72 feet. Water leaving its southern end flows into Whitford Brook and eventually continues toward the Mystic River and Long Island Sound.

So what happens around Long Pond doesn’t necessarily stay around Long Pond.

That’s the basic idea behind a watershed.

Yootay Singers Open the Main Program

At 10 a.m., the Yootay Singers will help open Waterfest, followed by welcomes, introductions and instructions for the day.

Indigenous participation isn’t an ornamental addition to the festival.

The Alliance itself is structured around collaboration among the four watershed municipalities and the Eastern Pequot and Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nations.

That partnership carries through the day’s schedule.

Later in the afternoon, Rashad Young of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation will perform on flute, followed by poetry from Derrick Strong of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation.

Young is the Language Director for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and serves on the Alliance’s Co-Leadership Board.

He’s also a traditional artisan.

His work includes making Native flutes, pipes, bows, drums, bags, leatherwork and other objects informed by Mashantucket Pequot and Narragansett traditions.

His flute playing has been featured at Tribal and public ceremonies, including Schemitzun and Indigenous commemorations at the Connecticut State Capitol.

At Waterfest, that music returns to the landscape from which much of the cultural tradition surrounding it emerged.

Before You Paddle, Learn to Clean the Boat

The first boat-cleaning demonstration begins at 10:30 a.m.

Another is scheduled for 1:30 p.m.

It might sound like a surprisingly mundane subject for a festival until you consider what can travel on a kayak, canoe, paddle, trailer, fishing equipment or other wet gear.

Aquatic invasive plants and organisms can be moved from one waterbody to another by recreational users without anyone realizing they’re carrying them.

Cleaning, draining and drying boats and equipment is one of the simplest ways individual paddlers can reduce that risk.

For a festival encouraging people to enjoy the water, teaching them how to avoid damaging the next body of water they visit is a logical companion lesson.

At 11, Waterfest Turns Back to 2010

One of the day’s most substantive programs begins at 11 a.m.

The first Community Conversation and Design Circle will look back at the catastrophic flooding of March 2010 and ask participants to help develop recommendations for reducing future flood risk.

For people who lived around Lantern Hill at the time, this isn’t an abstract climate discussion.

The 2010 flood physically changed the landscape.

Heavy rain caused Long Pond Dam to overtop.

Whitford Brook overtopped Lantern Hill Road.

Lantern Hill Pond flooded the intersection around Homestead and Lantern Hill roads.

A bridge south of Lantern Hill Pond was breached and washed out.

Road infrastructure suffered significant damage.

In Ledyard, firefighters spent days pumping flooded properties while public works crews dealt with damaged roads. A year later, the town was still planning major reconstruction work.

Sixteen years later, the flood remains important enough that the Alliance’s current Mystic River Watershed Vulnerability Assessment uses photographs of the 2010 event to illustrate the risks facing the upper watershed.

The Flood Question Isn’t Settled

That’s what makes the Waterfest conversation more than a history lesson.

The towns and watershed organizations are still working on infrastructure in the Lantern Hill and Whitford Brook corridor.

In 2022, Ledyard accepted $3 million in state funding for infrastructure improvements involving the Whitford Brook area, including work connected with Long Pond Dam, Bush Pond Dam, Bush Pond Dike and nearby culverts.

Then, in April 2026, Ledyard authorized another $3.2248 million transportation grant for replacement of the Lantern Hill Road bridge over Whitford Brook below Long Pond.

Those projects exist alongside a broader regional effort to understand how flooding, extreme heat and drought could affect the Mystic River watershed in the future.

The current vulnerability assessment brings together the four watershed towns, both Tribal Nations, the Alliance, Connecticut Sea Grant, Fuss & O’Neill, Resilient Land & Water and the Long Island Sound Study.

Waterfest gives ordinary residents a seat in that conversation.

Lunch Comes With a Dance Like Water Party

After a morning spent thinking about infrastructure and flood resilience, the schedule deliberately loosens up.

From 12:30 to 1 p.m., it’s time for lunch, music and the Dance Like Water Party.

Free food is part of the Waterfest experience.

It’s another example of how the Alliance has structured its community events differently from conventional environmental meetings.

You don’t have to arrive with technical knowledge.

You don’t need to belong to an environmental organization.

You can come because you want to paddle.

You can come for the music.

You can come because your children want to swim.

And while you’re there, you might learn why a culvert a few hundred yards away matters to a fish swimming north from Long Island Sound.

Rashad Young and Derrick Strong Take Over at 1

At 1 p.m., Waterfest shifts toward Indigenous music and spoken word.

Rashad Young will perform on Mashantucket flute, followed by poems from Eastern Pequot writer and Alliance co-founder Derrick Strong.

Strong’s words are already woven into the Alliance’s identity.

The organization prominently uses his line:

“The rivers flow through us.”

It’s an unusually concise expression of the idea behind Waterfest.

A watershed isn’t simply a blue line on a map that communities agree to protect.

Its water passes through drinking supplies, ecosystems, food systems, cultural traditions and communities.

The people living around it are part of the watershed, too.

At 1:30, Paddle Toward a Fishway That Doesn’t Exist Yet

One of the most interesting activities of the day begins at 1:30 p.m.

Following another boat-cleaning demonstration, participants can join a guided paddle to the future fishway at Long Pond Dam.

The project could dramatically change what Long Pond means to migratory fish.

Right now, Long Pond Dam creates a barrier on Whitford Brook.

Alewives are anadromous fish. They’re born in freshwater, migrate to the ocean and later return to freshwater to spawn.

A dam can turn what was once a connected migration route into a dead end.

The proposed solution at Long Pond is a nature-like fishway.

Instead of relying on a highly engineered ladder-like structure, the concept uses a channel designed to mimic natural stream conditions, allowing fish to gradually move around the obstruction.

The Numbers Behind the Fishway Are Enormous

The potential ecological payoff is much larger than the size of the project might suggest.

Engineering work for the Long Pond project reports that Connecticut DEEP Fisheries estimated restored passage could eventually support an annual run of more than 250,000 alewives.

The project could help establish approximately 6.6 miles of connected river corridor, stretching from the confluence of Whitford Brook and the Mystic River upstream toward the top of the Lantern Hill Pond system.

Alewives aren’t the only species that could benefit.

The Whitford Brook system is also habitat for migratory and resident fish including American eel, and improved stream connectivity can benefit an entire aquatic food web.

That’s why the afternoon paddle is more interesting than simply paddling to a dam.

Participants will be traveling toward a place where people are actively trying to reconnect the freshwater at Waterfest with the sea.

At 2, The Conversation Moves From Water to Hemp

The second Community Conversation begins at 2 p.m. with an unusual subject:

Living in a locally grown hemp home.

It may seem like a detour from ponds and fishways, but it fits the larger theme of community resilience.

Industrial hemp can be processed into building materials, including hemp-lime composites commonly known as hempcrete. These materials have attracted attention as alternatives to more carbon-intensive conventional construction materials.

Waterfest’s afternoon conversation puts that idea into the local context: what happens when building materials can be grown regionally, and how might housing itself become part of a more regenerative relationship between people, land and climate?

It’s another example of Waterfest deliberately stretching the definition of watershed care beyond picking up trash beside a stream.

There Are Prizes at 3

The day’s prize drawing begins at 3 p.m.

The Alliance hasn’t published a complete prize list in the event information provided, so consider that part a surprise.

The main public festival concludes at 4 p.m.

Volunteers who want to stay and help put the site back together can participate in cleanup from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

That’s an appropriately practical ending for an event about stewardship.

Waterfest Is Really About Who Gets to Make the Decisions

The Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed is a relatively young nonprofit, but its organizational model is one of the more interesting things about it.

Rather than treating the watershed as belonging to whichever municipality happens to contain a particular stream, the Alliance works across four towns and two Tribal Nations.

Its mission combines ecological health with community resilience and cultural vitality.

That matters because water ignores political borders.

Floodwater doesn’t stop at a town line.

Neither does pollution.

Neither does a migrating alewife.

And neither does the Mystic River watershed.

Waterfest puts that philosophy into practice for a day.

Swim in the pond.

Paddle it.

Listen to music beside it.

Learn how to keep invasive species out of it.

Remember what happened when it overflowed in 2010.

Imagine hundreds of thousands of fish eventually reaching it again.

And, most importantly, join the conversation about what happens next.

Details

Event: Waterfest 2026
Theme: Water Inspires
Date: Saturday, September 19, 2026
Main Location: Long Pond
Address: 79 Homestead Road, Ledyard, CT
Admission: Free
Donations: Encouraged to help offset Waterfest costs and support the Alliance’s watershed programs
Main Program: 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Optional Lantern Hill Hike: 8 a.m.; meet/sign in at Two Trees Inn parking lot at 7:45 a.m.
10 a.m.: Yootay Singers; welcome, introductions and instructions
10:30 a.m.: Boat-cleaning demonstration
11 a.m.–Noon: Community Conversation/Design Circle on the 2010 flood and flood-risk-reduction recommendations
12:30–1 p.m.: Lunch, music and Dance Like Water Party
1 p.m.: Rashad Young, Mashantucket flute; Derrick Strong, Eastern Pequot poetry
1:30 p.m.: Boat-cleaning demonstration and guided paddle to the future fishway
2 p.m.: Community Conversation Round 2, Living in a Locally Grown Hemp Home
3 p.m.: Prize drawing
4–5:30 p.m.: Event cleanup
Activities: Swimming, paddling, environmental learning, art, music, community exhibits and conversations
Organizer: Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed
Event Contact: 914-462-2857
What to Bring: Dress for outdoor activities and the day’s weather. Participants planning to paddle or swim should bring appropriate personal equipment and follow event safety instructions.
Weather: Outdoor waterfront event; check the organizer’s event information for any weather-related updates.

More information is available at the Event Website link below.

 

Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.

Resources

Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed – Team
Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed – Support Our Work
Mystic River Watershed Vulnerability Assessment
Mystic River Watershed Living Atlas
Town of Ledyard – Whitford Brook Watershed Infrastructure Improvements
Town of Ledyard – 2026 Lantern Hill Road Bridge Funding
Princeton Hydro – Long Pond Nature-Like Fishway
Save the Sound – Long Pond Fish Passage
Mashantucket Pequot Museum – Rashad Young
United Way of Southeastern Connecticut – Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed