What Malletts Bay Colchester Late Summer Looks Like Now

The last Thursday of Colchester's free Summer Concert Series wrapped on August 6, when the Buck Hollers Band closed out the season at Lower Bayside Park with a set that ranged from Muddy Waters to Bob Dylan. Lawn chairs folded up, the picnic blankets went back in the trunk, and by the following Thursday the grass at Bayside was just grass again. If you only track Colchester by its calendar of scheduled things, that reads like the end of summer on the Bay.

It isn't. Anyone who actually lives along Malletts Bay this time of year knows the concert series was never the whole story. It was the loud part. What's happening now, in the two weeks after the music stopped, is quieter but arguably busier: the Causeway is still full of e-bikes, the restaurant strip on West Lakeshore Drive is doing its best work of the year without a concert crowd competing for tables, and the Bay is settling into the stretch that longtime residents actually plan around. The concert series offers one view of Colchester's summer, but it doesn't capture the full range of activity around the Bay.

What the summer lineup actually told you

The 2026 lineup at Lower Bayside Park covered a wide range of styles. Prydein opened in July with a Celtic-rock set built on Scottish and Irish tunes. The Steve Hartmann Trio followed, fronted by a singer-songwriter who's actually from Jericho, not some out-of-town act passing through. Satin & Steel brought a six-piece horn section through a set of Tower of Power and Earth, Wind & Fire covers that the town's own promotional copy calls a returning favorite. Melissa Plett Trio, Carol Ann Jones and the Superchargers, McMaple, and finally Buck Hollers Band carried it to the close.

None of that is unusual for a small-town summer series, and that's the point. The concert series is Colchester's most visible seasonal signal, the one that shows up in every "things to do" roundup, but it's a run of Thursday nights that ends on a fixed date regardless of what the weather or the water are doing. Malletts Bay itself doesn't run on that schedule.

The Causeway didn't get the memo

If concerts were the real measure of Bay activity, the Colchester Causeway would be thinning out by now too. It isn't. The Island Line Trail's bike ferry, the one that carries riders across the 200-foot gap known as the Cut, has been busier this year than in past seasons, not less. A May 2026 WCAX report tracked the shift: ridership on the ferry has grown from around 26,000 rides in 2019 to nearly 40,000 in 2025, and dockside volunteers say the growth isn't just word of mouth. JP Coseno at North Star Sports pointed to the wider availability of e-bikes as one real driver, since a longer causeway ride that used to wear people out is now an easy afternoon loop for riders who wouldn't have attempted it a few years back.

That matters for how you think about the Bay in late August specifically. The ferry runs on a donation basis, five dollars suggested each way, and it shifts to a daily schedule for peak summer before scaling back to weekends only as the season turns. Right now, in the second half of August, it's still running daily, which means the window for a full Burlington-to-South-Hero crossing without waiting for a weekend is closing faster than most people realize. If you've been meaning to ride it before the schedule contracts, this is closer to the end of that window than the middle of it.

Where the crowd actually eats now

The three restaurants tell a similar story to the ferry data. Their offerings include a new dinner menu at Pioneer Lakeshore Cafe, a 30-plus burger menu at Rozzi's Lakeshore Tavern, and a full-service steakhouse at The Lighthouse Restaurant & Lounge.

As the Colchester Sun reported, Jean-Luc and Lindsay Matecat, who run the kitchen and dining room at Pioneer Lakeshore Cafe, started the business as a food truck before converting it into a sit-down restaurant on West Lakeshore Drive in 2021. The cafe expanded its dinner menu this year.

As Seven Days reported, chef Levi Carter built The Lighthouse in the space once occupied by the Clover House. The report described a full-service steakhouse with a 60-item salad bar feeding more than 100 people a night.

The Bay's actual rhythm

Put those three threads together and the pattern is straightforward. The concert series is one seasonal marker at Bayside Park in summer, and it ends on a fixed date. The Causeway ferry, still running daily, is closer to its true seasonal peak right now than the concert calendar would suggest. The restaurants’ offerings add another part of the Bay’s summer beyond the concert season. If you live here, the two weeks after the last Thursday show are less a wind-down and more a decompression, the point when attention turns from concert nights to the Bay's other seasonal activities.

What follows next is the slower turn toward fall that Colchester does well: Sam Mazza's Farm Market starts pulling in the pumpkin and apple crowd, the Causeway ferry schedule contracts to weekends, and the Bay quiets in a way that has nothing to do with a concert lineup ending. That's not a lesser version of summer. For a lot of people who live on or near the water, it's the version they've been waiting for since June.

If you're weighing whether a stretch of Malletts Bay or another corner of Chittenden County fits the way you want to live across the seasons, that's the kind of read you can only get from someone paying attention to the neighborhood between the headline events. Pursuit Real Estate works this market street by street, season by season, and we're glad to walk through what a specific stretch of the Bay is really like before you make a decision. Book an appointment when you're ready to talk it through.