"The Decoy & Gunning Show has brought our community together to celebrate history, craftsmanship, and the great outdoors."
That line came from Ocean County Commissioner Robert Arace last fall, and it's the kind of thing officials say every September about the show that returns to Tip Seaman County Park and the Tuckerton Seaport. It's also, on its face, a strange thing to say about an event that has fewer vendor tables than it did four years ago.
The 44th Annual Old Time Barnegat Bay Decoy & Gunning Show runs Saturday, September 26 from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, September 27 from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., spread across two sites along Pohatcong Creek in downtown Tuckerton. This year's lineup includes more than 200 exhibitors. Back at the 40th anniversary show in 2022, organizers were advertising more than 300. That's not a rounding difference. It's close to a third of the marketplace gone in under half a decade.
And yet nobody who's grown up going to this show would describe it as smaller. That's the part worth sitting with if you live in Tuckerton and have watched this event evolve without quite naming what changed.
What Actually Shrank
The vendor side of the Decoy & Gunning Show has always been its most visible feature: tables of working and decorative decoys, antique fishing and hunting gear, wildlife art, duck boats, carving supplies. That's still here in 2026, just with a thinner footprint than recent years of Patch and local radio writeups suggest it used to have. Some of the older programming has quietly disappeared from recent event descriptions too. Sneakbox races and rubber duck races, both fixtures in earlier write-ups of the show, don't show up in the official 2026 program guide from Ocean County Parks & Recreation.
What has grown instead is the ceremonial and educational layer built around what's left. This year's show lists more than 50 contests, the same density as the 43rd anniversary show in 2025, spanning five separate decoy carving categories: traditional, contemporary, youth, miniature, and shorebird. The New Jersey State Duck Calling Championship carries a cash prize, and its winner goes on to represent the state at the National Duck Calling Championship in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Demonstrations run continuously across both sites: carving, gunning techniques, retriever skills, heritage presentations. Kids get their own track with decoy painting and scavenger hunts.
The show hasn't gotten smaller. It's gotten more selective about what it's protecting.
The Award That Explains the Shift
Buried in the county's own cultural heritage archive is a detail that clarifies the whole pattern: the Hurley Conklin Award. Named for one of the most respected carvers in Barnegat Bay history, it's given out most years to someone the community says has kept the tradition alive rather than just profited from it. Last year's honorees were Mark Ford of Little Egg Harbor, who started carving at age nine, and George Strunk, who has been part of the show since 1986 after retiring from ironwork.
That's the tell. A show built purely around vendor volume doesn't need an award for lineage. This one has built its identity around recognizing who's still doing the work by hand, in a region where the number of people doing that work commercially has almost certainly shrunk since 1983, when the show first began. The Ocean County Cultural & Heritage Commission keeps a running Decoy Show Hall of Fame and a full list of past Hurley Conklin Awardees, and reading down that list is close to reading a genealogy of who taught whom to carve a Barnegat Bay decoy over the last four decades.
What's on the Ground This Year
If you're planning your weekend around it, the practical shape of the show hasn't changed much from recent years:
- Two sites, one ticket: Stanley H. "Tip" Seaman County Park and Tuckerton Seaport & Baymen's Museum at 120 W Main Street, connected by free shuttle buses running both days.
- Parking: Free shuttle pickup from Pinelands Regional High School and Freedom Fields County Park, the same two lots the show has used for years.
- Rain or shine: No weather cancellations. Bring the boots.
- Food and music: Food trucks and live music run at both locations throughout the day, alongside heritage films and environmental exhibits.
- On the water: Tuckerton Creek boat rides depart from the Seaport for anyone who wants the view from the water instead of the boardwalk.
Full program details, including the contest schedule and exhibitor list, are posted through Ocean County Tourism's event page.
Why the Distinction Matters If You Live Here
It would be easy to read a shrinking exhibitor count as a sign that something is fading in Tuckerton, the same way people sometimes read a closed storefront on Main Street as decline rather than turnover. But the Decoy & Gunning Show is doing something more specific than either growing or fading. It's converting from a marketplace into an archive with a pulse, one where the point isn't how many decoys change hands but who's still carrying the knowledge of how to make one that works on the water.
That's consistent with the rest of what Tuckerton is: a town that was a thriving seaport from the mid-1700s through the late 1800s and has spent the century since figuring out how to hold onto that identity without freezing it in place. The Baymen's Museum right on Main Street exists for exactly this reason. So does the fact that a duck-calling contest here still sends its winner to a national championship in Arkansas, which means the standard being judged in Tuckerton every September is a real one, not a local formality.
If you've lived here long enough to notice the vendor rows getting shorter, you've been noticing the right thing. You just haven't been wrong to keep going anyway.
The show runs September 26 and 27 this year. Whether you go for the decoys, the duck calling, or the boat ride down Tuckerton Creek, it's worth showing up while the people who still know how to do this by hand are the ones being honored for it.
For more on what's happening around Tuckerton and the rest of Long Beach Island's surrounding communities, or if you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Jersey Shore, the team at BHHS Zack Shore has spent a century learning these towns block by block. Find Your Dream Home starts with a conversation about the neighborhood you already love.
