For most of the more than a million people who live and work in Hampton Roads, Naval Station Norfolk is a place you see in pieces: gray hulls stacked along the horizon from the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, the flat gray deck of a carrier catching the light, a destroyer sliding out past the piers. About 80,000 people come to work there every day. Everyone else mostly drives past it. On Saturday, October 24, that changes. Fleet Fest, the installation's annual open house, swings the gates open to the public, free of charge.
The event runs at Pier 14 and the surrounding area, and the centerpiece is the chance to walk the decks of real warships. For anyone who has only ever seen these ships from a distance, the difference between a hull on the horizon and a passageway you can actually stand in is the whole point of the day.
Fleet Fest is not a new invention, but it has a specific origin: it began as a birthday party. Naval Station Norfolk was built on July 4, 1917, on the waterfront at Sewell's Point, ground that had hosted the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition a decade earlier. When the base turned 100 in 2017, the installation marked the milestone with a "Centennial Fleet Fest" on October 21 of that year, an all-day affair at Pier 14 and the Q Area that ran from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and closed with a fireworks show. The Navy framed it as a look forward as much as a look back: "In looking toward the future, Naval Station Norfolk will offer a modern-day Fleet Fest to begin the start of the next 100 years." The formula stuck, and the open house became an annual fixture on the Hampton Roads calendar.
What has grown around that core is a full day of things to do that have nothing to do with standing in line for a ship. There is a chili cook-off. There are military static displays and live demonstrations, local vendors and food, a car show, and live entertainment. The United States Fleet Forces Rock Band welcomed crowds onto Pier 14 at the 2024 event.
The base has used the event to build a relationship with the region rather than just show off hardware. In 2024, the edition added a free carnival for the first time and drew thousands for tours of the USS Iwo Jima, the USS Gonzalez and two Coast Guard cutters, along with search-and-rescue demonstrations and a military working dog exhibition.
Capt. Matt Schlarmann, the installation's commanding officer, has described the day as a chance to close a gap in understanding. "Sailors and civilians are very proud of what they do," he said during the 2024 event. Speaking to WTKR that year, with several Norfolk-based ships deployed to the Middle East, he put it more plainly: "When they see a ship shooting down a missile or anything else out there, realize that those sailors on board that ship live in Hampton Roads and it's important to support those folks out there. We like to open up the base for today to give people that kind of experience to go on board the ship and see, 'hey, this is how our sailors are living.'"
Fleet Fest is rain or shine, and the Navy notes that ships, demonstrations and activities are all subject to change with the operational schedule. That caveat is not boilerplate: the whole appeal of the day is that these are working ships on a working base, and the fleet comes first.
For a region whose identity is so bound up in the Navy, the appeal is simple. It is one day a year when the fence comes down, the pier is open, and the ships you normally only glimpse from a bridge are close enough to touch.