By Stephanie Loder
Playland’s Castaway Cove beachfront amusement park in Ocean City plans to open its 2025 season in the spring with a new, 60-foot-long pirate ship at the entrance to replace the one destroyed in a fire nearly four years ago.
A four-alarm blaze in January 2021 destroyed Playland’s arcade and iconic three-masted ship with an oversized parrot and a pistol-packing pirate on the resort’s Boardwalk.
Fire officials said the blaze was accidental and caused by an undetermined electrical source near the front of the building.
Playland reopened for visitors in the spring of 2021 – but without the pirate ship.
“It (the pirate ship) was in our original plan three years ago and everything was approved,” said Playland’s Vice President Brian Hartley.
The pirate ship is not a Playland amusement ride.
“It’s a decoration – but it’s funny, we never realized how much it meant to people until after the fire. It’s one of those things we learned after the fire and the picture of the pirate ship kept popping up on social media and people were concerned whether we would have another pirate ship.”
The new pirate ship will be stationary, but it will play music and have cannons that fire with bursts of smoke and fog.
“The ship will not move but the cannons will fire to create a little more entertainment and make it more of a show as people are walking by,” Hartley said.
Hartley said he anticipates the pirate ship to be installed in time for Playland’s opening on Easter Weekend 2025.
“We anticipate everything to be ready for Easter weekend. We are moving along. It might even be Palm Sunday weekend, but it absolutely should be ready by Easter weekend. It’s been long enough,” Hartley said.
The new pirate ship is being created by a fabrication company on the West Coast and “will be trucked in and dropped off,” Hartley said.
“The fabrication company is very well versed in this and it (the pirate ship) is going to look awesome,” he said.
The new pirate ship will be more vibrant, he added.
“The old one was constructed out of wood and built by hand,” Hartley said. “There’s so much more that can be done with the technology at hand now, like 3-D printing and molds. It will be a lot more intricate.”
The pirate ship is expected to arrive in December, but will remain in storage until February, he said.
“Winds off the ocean make it difficult to have a crane up there, so it’s not an ideal time to do the job right now. We’re looking at the end of February or the beginning of March to start putting it up,” he said.
The amusement park is also approved to add a roller coaster along with the pirate ship.
However, Hartley said the roller coaster is “two or three years down the road.”
“We are working with some different manufacturers and we have been trying to get some concepts and ideas of what we want to incorporate into the ride,” he said.
“We plan to take a look at all those ideas and we will end up blending all of them because we have some really cool ideas,” he said.
The rollercoaster will be “ a family-oriented ride, something that is not fast, and that is something that mom and grandmom can ride on.”
Hartley isn’t giving away a lot of details, but he said one idea for the rollercoaster is to include “slow, hidden turns.”
Hartley anticipates additional visitors for the 2025 season because of the closing of Gillian’s Wonderland Pier in October.
“It’s unfortunately what happened down there (Wonderland). We are a tourism industry here, and any loss of entertainment is a detriment,” Hartley said.
Playland has been on the Boardwalk since 1959 and is now the resort’s only amusement park,
Hartley, who started his career at Playland at age 14, has been with the company for 33 years.
He is adamant the pirate ship will be installed on time.
“We’ve been working on these plans for years. We’re always looking to improve,” he said.
