“We mowed it last Wednesday, and look at it now. I’ve never experienced anything like it.” Eddie Mensink walks through the tall grass that has already grown on the festival grounds. He is the organizer of the festival, who has set up his tent just outside Borger.

Just as the grass has found fertile ground in the burgher, the organizer Mancinck asserts, so too has the huge pirate festival. “You can say that. We’re at Burger’s every year and it fits us just fine. People in this area love it, and we keep coming back to it. This is the one stop we go back to every year.”

Minsink started the Pirate Festival in 2004 with a relatively small party in Lemmlerfeld in Overijssel. It is now a traveling pirate music festival that offers many performances in the spring and fall. This year the festival will be held in Borger for the eighteenth time.

Drenthe is a typical pirate area, according to Mensink. “Think of Jannes, born near here. Think of Lucas and Gea, René Karst. You name it, many of the singers come from the area. Also in the past in hacking, hacking music has been very successful here.”

The festival site gets built up and broken down several times each season, and has been for years. Today is the final touch. Mensink talks about it easily, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

“We had a lot of water a week and a half ago, so you have to take a good look at how stable the site is and where the road boards need to be. We started building last Thursday. The tent was ready a week now and tomorrow there will be ten thousand visitors, we are sold out “.