There’s a fun new addition to the St. Patrick’s Festival next month. Royal Poinciana and The Girls’ Education Project are pleased to announce the inaugural CATCH THE MERMAID: the Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt in Montserrat on Saturday, March 12th, 2016.
CATCH THE MERMAID: the Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt is a two-day team event that takes place the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day. This year, the Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt will begin on Piper’s Pond at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday March 12th and end at Little Bay on Sunday March 13th at 3:00 p.m..
According a press release from the organisers, the idea was birthed by Misses Tiffany Weekes and Beyonce Osborne, two 13-year-old members of The Girls’ Education Project, the Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt is “a two-day event created by history, circumstances and nature.
“The Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt is a unique and irresistible team-event that gets Montserrat’s St. Patrick’s Festival off to a running start. Packed with head-scratching clues and breath-taking views, one or two moderately-challenging obstacles and a finish that is open-ended to say the very least, it provides hours and hours of excitement and camaraderie and leaves everyone with memories to last twelve lifetimes or more,” the release explains.
Compelling and powerful, the Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt brings to life the legend of the Mermaid of Chances Pond. When the volcano erupted on Chances Peak, she lost the pond that was her home, and has not been seen again since. The young women of The Girls’ Education Project say they want to find Montserrat’s Mermaid and give her a brand new home where she will be safe and loved.
Partners in The Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt include the Office of the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, the Tourism Division, Radio Montserrat, the St. Patrick’s Day Committee, Scriber’s Adventures, Aqua Montserrat, the Montserrat National Trust, the Healing & Transformation Committee and Hypnotik, the organisers of Leprechaun’s Revenge, among others.
Register online or pick up registration forms everywhere on island. Treasure Hunt registration fees include entrance fees to some participating Festival events.
Find us online at mnimermaid.wix.com/treasure-hunt and on Facebook at Catch The Mermaid: the Great St. Patrick’s Treasure Hunt.
Follow the action. Join the action. Register right now.
The Legend
There used to be a pond in Montserrat, three thousand and two feet above the sea on top of Chances Peak, the highest mountain on the island. Legend has it that a mermaid used to live in that pond; how she got there, the legends do not actually reveal, but it was general agreement that she must have somehow lost her way heartbroken, jilted by a sailor or tricked by a leprechaun, perhaps, or through some other unfortunate occurrence of the kind that happens only in the lives of mermaids.
According to these same legends, the mermaid of Chances Pond could sometimes be seen by very special people, sitting in her pond, combing her long hair, strand by strand, for hours on end with a comb made of solid gold, or diamond –no-‐one had ever touched it, so no-‐one could really tell. Some people say she’d sing as she combed her hair, but no one could ever distinguish the words or remember the melody.
In fact, some people say she wasn’t really singing at all, but that she was crying, as she had been for the last one thousand years.
