Encinitas's Surf Festival Just Outgrew Its Own City Limits

"The surf films that inspire us, the music that becomes the soundtrack to our lives."

Taylor Steele said that about the festival he built here in Encinitas, and this year the words finally matched the size of the thing. Sessions Surf Festival wrapped its film program at La Paloma Theatre on Saturday, closing out a week that started with seven bands on the sand at Seaside Reef and included an art show that, for the first time, didn't stay inside city limits.

If you've lived here more than a few Septembers, that last detail is the one worth sitting with. This town has three long-running traditions stacked into the same few weeks of early fall, and 2026 is the year one of them stopped fitting inside Encinitas alone.

The Concert That Wasn't There Before

Sessions Surf Festival started a few years back as Solento Surf Festival, and for most of its life it was a modest affair built around surf films and panel conversations, with music playing a supporting role. This year organizers added something the festival had never had: a full concert day. On Saturday, September 12, the Seaside Reef parking lot in Cardiff hosted seven bands from noon until 10 p.m., building toward headliners Osees and Poway punk veterans Unwritten Law, with Nashville's Bully and Yoke Lore filling out the bill.

Sunday, September 13 brought the festival back to Seaside Reef for a free community Beach Day, with a surf contest called the Count Down Cup running for both competitors and spectators, plus more music into the evening. Neither day required a ticket to just show up and watch from the sand, which is part of why the crowd built steadily through the afternoon rather than arriving all at once for a headliner.

None of that existed in the festival's earlier years. The film screenings did. The panel discussions did. A full day of national touring acts on a public beach, timed to draw a crowd that built through the afternoon, did not.

When the Art Show Left Town

The bigger shift happened two days later, and it's the one that changes how you should think about this festival going forward. On Monday, September 14, the festival's art program opened not on Coast Highway 101 in Encinitas, where it had lived in past years, but at Hot Water Gallery in Carlsbad. Roughly a dozen artists showed surf-related work in a space that stayed open through the week, with live music, food, and drinks at the opening reception.

That's a drive up the coast into a different city entirely. A film festival that used to be a hometown affair, contained inside one theater and one stretch of highway, now has programming that requires leaving Encinitas to see all of it. The film sessions stayed anchored where they've always been, at La Paloma Theatre on South Coast Highway 101, running Thursday through Saturday, September 17 through 19. Thursday featured a documentary on pro surfer Blake Johnston. Friday's program, a 25th-anniversary screening of Chris Malloy and Taylor Steele's film "Shelter," featuring Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, Shane Dorian, and Taylor Knox among others, sold out before the weekend arrived.

A hometown festival that sells out its anniversary screening while also running satellite programming in a neighboring city isn't the same event it was three years ago. It's outgrown the container Encinitas gave it, even while its most sentimental night, a 25-year-old film about the surfers who shaped this stretch of coast, still belongs entirely to this town.

Two Older Traditions That Didn't Move an Inch

Compare that to what happened two weeks earlier, on Sunday, August 30, when the Leucadia 101 Mainstreet Association held the 20th annual LeucadiART Walk. This is one of North County's largest juried fine art shows, and this year's edition looked almost exactly like last year's: about 100 artists lining a one-mile stretch of North Coast Highway 101, a free bike valet from Leucadia Cyclery, a free trolley running from the La Costa Avenue Park-and-Ride, and a crowd in the neighborhood of 7,500 to 8,000 people, a number that's held steady for years running.

Twenty years in, the Walk hasn't needed to expand its footprint or borrow a second city to keep growing its audience. It just keeps doing the same mile of highway, the same juried format, and the crowd keeps showing up in roughly the same numbers. That's a different kind of success than what Sessions Surf Festival is chasing, and it's worth noticing that both models work here at the same time, a few weeks apart, on the same corridor.

The reliable bookend to all of it lands next Sunday. The Encinitas Chamber of Commerce runs its 30th annual Oktoberfest on September 27, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mountain Vista Drive, off El Camino Real between Wandering Road and Rambling Road. It's free, it spans about a third of a mile, and it typically draws around 175 exhibitors selling everything from bratwurst and pretzels to local artisan goods, alongside a beer garden, carnival rides, and Bavarian music and dance troupes. Thirty years running, the format hasn't changed because it doesn't need to. Nobody is asking this festival to add a concert stage or a second venue in another city. Its job is to show up on the same street every fall, and it does.

Three Different Kinds of Staying Power

Line these three up and a pattern shows itself that you don't notice if you only catch one of them. Oktoberfest has spent three decades proving that a neighborhood tradition doesn't need to change to stay relevant. LeucadiART Walk has spent two decades proving the same thing at a slightly larger scale, drawing thousands more people without altering a format that already worked. Sessions Surf Festival is the outlier, a homegrown event that outgrew its own geography in a single season, adding a concert day and a Carlsbad gallery while its emotional core, that sold-out night at La Paloma, stayed exactly where it started.

None of these were built by a promoter parachuting in from outside. Steele is a San Diego native who's been making surf films since the 1990s. The Leucadia 101 Mainstreet Association is a local business group that's run its Walk since before some of the artists in it were born. The Chamber of Commerce has run Oktoberfest since before most of Mountain Vista Drive's current homeowners moved in. What changes and what stays fixed here isn't dictated by outside investment. It's decided by the people running these events, year over year, based on what the town actually wants more of.

If you're trying to read the shape of Encinitas life this fall, that's the thing worth carrying forward. The town isn't uniformly growing its events or uniformly keeping them small. It's doing both at once, on purpose, a few blocks apart.

What's Still Ahead

If you're figuring out what to actually put on the calendar before the month closes out, here's what's left:

• September 27, Encinitas Oktoberfest, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mountain Vista Drive. Free admission, German food, a beer garden, and around 175 exhibitors.
• Ongoing through the fall, keep an eye on the Encinitas 101 MainStreet Association's calendar for the next Cruise Night on the 101, held monthly on the third Thursday downtown.

Sessions Surf Festival closed out its 2026 run this past weekend, but if this year's expansion is any indication, next September's version is worth watching for early, since a festival that just added a concert day and a second-city art show isn't likely to shrink back down.

Whether you've lived here for one September or twenty, the rhythm of this town shows up in the events that never change as much as the ones that do. If you're curious about how a particular Encinitas neighborhood lives day to day, not just what a listing says about it, the team at Jill Vodicka knows these streets well enough to walk you through it. Let's Connect.