By the last Saturday before Halloween, Morro Rock is doing its usual thing, sitting there in the fog while the tide runs past it, and a few hundred people in witch hats and cape costumes are paddling straight at it. They launch from Coleman Beach, at the north end of the Embarcadero, and work their way south past the harbor toward Tidelands Park, sea otters and sea lions occasionally popping up to watch. Nobody registered for this. Nobody applied for a permit. It just happens, the way it has happened for more than a decade, and it is the closest thing Morro Bay has to a defining Halloween tradition.
Most coastal towns do Halloween on land: a lit-up main drag, a trunk-or-treat in a church parking lot, maybe a haunted house. Morro Bay does its version on the water, and that single fact says something real about how this town organizes itself. The people who show up to paddle a bay in October are not waiting on a city department to schedule their fun. They are doing it themselves, and the calendar has simply learned to build around them.
A grassroots event that outgrew its own founders
The Witches and Warlocks Paddle started as a way to celebrate a friend's birthday, according to one longtime participant who has followed the event for years. The first year drew about a dozen people. There was no sponsor, no city rec department, no formal organizing committee. It was a handful of friends with paddleboards and a good idea.
That informality is still baked into how the event runs. Visit Morro Bay's own event page carries a disclaimer calling it "non-permitted, non-sanctioned," and tells participants to follow standard water safety rules on their own. There's no registration. You show up at Coleman Park at 101 Coleman Drive, you bring your own board or kayak, and you paddle.
What's changed is the scale. The event marked its 13th year in 2025, and organizers said more than 600 people took part, a jump from the dozen or so who started it. Local radio coverage put the prior year's turnout above 400. The exact number moves depending on who's counting and which year they're describing, but the direction is not in question: what began as a private joke among friends is now large enough that other cities have copied it, including a version on Oregon's Willamette River. One regular who has done the paddle three years running described it as attracting people who come from as far as Templeton just for the day, and called Morro Bay the flagship location, since the format has spread but the original still draws the biggest crowd.
The 2026 paddle is set for October 24, the Saturday before Halloween, with the same start point at Coleman Park and the same informal, come-as-you-are structure. It benefits the Food Bank Coalition of San Luis Obispo County, which has been the named beneficiary in recent years, so the costumes and the kayaks are doing double duty as a fundraiser nobody had to pass a hat for twice.
Where the costumes actually come from
If you're assembling a witch or warlock look in Morro Bay, you're probably not driving to a costume superstore. Visit Morro Bay's own shopping guide for the paddle points people toward Achievement House on Morro Bay Boulevard and Foxy's Thrift House a few doors down, both secondhand and resale shops that happen to be well stocked for exactly this kind of costume hunt. Achievement House is run by NCI Affiliates, a nonprofit that supports people with disabilities, so a chunk of the town's Halloween prep runs directly through a thrift store with a social mission attached, not a seasonal pop-up chain.
It's a small detail, but it's the kind of detail that separates a town's actual Halloween from a generic one. There's no dedicated costume shop here. There's a thrift economy that absorbs the demand every October, and everybody already knows where to go.
Main Street warms up while the bay empties out
By the time paddlers are hauling boards out of the water near Tidelands Park, Main Street is just getting started. The Siren, at 900 Main Street, has spent the past several years undergoing a $1.5 million renovation and retrofit, emerging as the town's main live music stage, according to its own listing history and reviews on Yelp. The building itself is roughly a century old. What's inside it now is a full bar, an upscale pub kitchen, a fireplace on the back patio, and a stage big enough to book touring acts alongside Central Coast locals.
The fall 2026 booking calendar backs that up. The Record Company is scheduled to play October 3. D.R.I. follows on October 8. Looking East is scheduled to play October 9, and Mickey Avalon is set to take the stage October 10, according to concert listing services tracking the venue. That's four notable touring acts inside a single week and a half, in a town of Morro Bay's size. The paddle and the Siren aren't officially connected on any calendar, but together they capture a familiar Morro Bay rhythm: water in the afternoon, live music on Main Street after dark.
If you need to eat before or after either one, the newest option downtown is Mosey's Burgers, which opened its Morro Bay location in mid-January 2026, its second in San Luis Obispo County after an original spot elsewhere in the county. It's a smashburger joint that also runs chicken and steak tacos and brews its own root beer using locally roasted coffee, and it uses locally sourced meat and produce without seed oils, per its own site. It's not built around Halloween. It's just one more sign that the strip of businesses around Main Street has kept adding capacity at the same time the paddle has kept adding paddlers.
The same month, a different kind of festival entirely
October in Morro Bay isn't a one-event month. The town's older, more formally organized waterfront tradition, long known as the Harbor Festival and running for roughly four decades, has in recent years folded into a broader Maritime Festival format spread across several days rather than a single weekend. As NBC Los Angeles reported, Kendall Welch, president of the Morro Bay Maritime Museum, explained the shift by pointing to a couple of years of financial support from Visit Morro Bay for the museum's Family Fun Day, plus a Morro Bay Yacht Club fundraiser called Rock the Harbor, and said the decision was made to expand the maritime programming into "Maritime Month" across multiple days rather than compress it into one.
What that expanded format includes, per the museum and Visit Morro Bay's own current listings, is a Family Fun Day built around fish painting, knot tying, Coast Guard exhibits, and sandcastle building, plus a public screening of the classic pirate film Treasure Island and a yacht race called the Harbor Cup that closes out the run. It's a genuinely different register from the Witches Paddle: organized, museum-backed, family-daytime programming, versus a costume flotilla that nobody officially sanctions. Both happen on the same stretch of water within weeks of each other, and both count as normal October in this town, not novelty.
There's a third thread running quietly under both: the Morro Bay Rotary Club's tradition of a drive-through tri-tip dinner each fall, cooked with beans, garlic bread, and salad, with proceeds going toward local scholarships and community projects. It's the kind of fundraiser that doesn't make anyone's travel guide, but it's been part of how the club supports the town for years, and it's exactly the sort of thing you only know about if you're the kind of person who orders ahead rather than the kind who's just visiting.
What this actually tells you about the town
None of this is really about Halloween. It's about how Morro Bay handles its own calendar. The paddle proves the town will let an unofficial, unpermitted, friend-organized tradition grow into something with hundreds of participants and a nonprofit beneficiary, without ever needing to formalize it. The Maritime Festival proves the town can also run a structured, museum-anchored, multi-day civic event when the organizations behind it decide it's time to expand. The Siren proves a hundred-year-old building can be rebuilt into an anchor of a live music scene, with a full bar, pub kitchen, and stage for touring acts and Central Coast locals. And a thrift store on Morro Bay Boulevard proves the costume supply chain here runs through community organizations instead of a seasonal retail chain.
That's a lot of range for one small coastal town in the space of a single month, and it's the kind of texture that doesn't show up on a festival calendar app. It shows up when you've actually spent an October here.
If you already call this stretch of the Embarcadero home and you want to talk about anything happening in it, from the paddle route to what's opening on Main Street next, Robert Sousa is always up for that conversation. Let's Connect.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
