Sculptors Working in the Sand Create Dream Castles for Cash

They began hitting the beach well before dawn--phalanxes of sculptors, architects, teachers and busboys. They came armed with the tools of their trade--wheelbarrows, spatulas and chocolate syrup.

By noon, the beach was a giant cartoon strip. A walrus in sunglasses sat in a roadster full of penguins. Seaweed-headed mermaids lolled in the sun. An angular, chartreuse-haired “New Wave Family” watched TV, near a scale model of Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian castle.

By mid-afternoon, the prizes had gone out--$3,500 for a 12-foot-tall Viking in a sled drawn by polar bears and $1,500 for the Bavarian castle. There were more awards, worth $9,000, and a year’s worth of pizzas for one fourth-place winner.

Come high tide, it would all be history. But no one seemed to care.

“It’s instant sculpture,” laughed sculptor John Danna. “And it’s instantly gone!”

The fifth annual United States Open Sandcastle Competition came and went Sunday in an industrious sandstorm of seawater and salvaged kelp, sprayed-on food dye and dustings of flour, and the dancing of homemade tools across wet sand.

Forty-seven 10-person teams, with members from as far away as Hawaii and Arizona, spread out north and south of the Imperial Beach pier. Each team worked a 30-foot by 30-foot plot, roped off with yellow nylon string like a miniature archeological dig.

A Dixieland band played at the edge of the surf. Sunburned babies and wide-eyed grandparents rambled past the sculptors. Lifeguards pronounced it a “big day”--an estimated 90,000 people on the beach.

In the end, an almost-home town team and local favorite won.

Sand Sculptors International, headed in part by Solana Beach contractor Gerry Kirk, conquered the special “masters’ class.” One week earlier, the team’s Viking warrior had won the world championship in British Columbia.

Second in the masters’ class was King Ludwig’s castle, built by an Orange County team called the Sand Dabblers. Other division winners included the Imperial Beach Star News, with a giant dog delivering a newspaper.

There were only a handful of reported casualties. One sculptor was hit by a wooden sand mold and had to be hospitalized. An arm fell off a sand caveman but was quickly repaired. A team of computer maintenance men from the Navy ran out of beer.

“We don’t have any idea what we’re doing,” said Garry Smith of the Navy contingent. “But we’re giving it a hell of a try.”

The pros began setting up well before sunrise, although the opening gun wasn’t until 8:30.

Kirk’s team, which includes several architects and contractors, had built their Viking in rehearsals and in competition. Well-versed in the importance of water, they brought 800 three-gallon buckets and started filling them at dawn.

The Orange County team came with plastic-covered drawings of the castle, a historical explanation, and a sketch of Ludwig II. Team head Larry Chaffers carried his tools on his hip--spatulas, level, melon-ball cutter and a special gizmo for neo-Gothic castle windows.

In other categories, most of the contestants winged it.

A group of waitresses and busboys from a Pacific Beach restaurant got stuck in traffic and arrived 90 minutes late. They forged ahead anyway, using garbage cans and kitchen knives, calling their small forest of lumps and shapes “a futuristic city.”

“Family in Search of a Tan” ended up drenched in ketchup, mustard and chocolate syrup, with white bellies dusted in bleached flour. There were cigarette butts in the ashtray of the “New Wave Family” ashtray and a twisted cypress on their coffee table.

Sand sculpture aficionados called conditions superb: fine sand, a short distance to carry water, and a big crowd. But they kept busy misting down the works with rose sprayers lest the hot sun dry out the sand and make the sculpture crumble.

Handmade wooden molds were a common sight, used increasingly in sand sculpting to allow greater “compaction.” Sculptors fill the molds with sand, drench it, and force out the air. “Compaction” allows height, which usually impresses the judges.

“The real thing is to get compaction down to a science--get rid of all the air pockets and fault lines,” said Tom Kirstein, the chief judge. Then the sculptors remove the form and begin carving into the block of sand.

For some, the competition was good business--an opportunity to plug a restaurant or a sponsor, or to make a name in business as an offbeat kind of guy. For a team from a school for retarded adults from Ramona, it was an opportunity to work on the concept of teamwork.

Shirley Steele, a judge in the family division, saw the event as good promotion for Imperial Beach. She said the town was going through troubled times and could use the attention drawn to its relatively underdeveloped waterfront.

For Kirstein, a public accountant who started the world championships in White Rock, Canada seven years ago, that competition became a route into politics. He was elected mayor of White Rock after starting the event. As he explained simply, “Someone cared about the beach.”

Five years ago, after becoming the sister city to White Rock, Imperial Beach borrowed the idea. Entry fees this year were $35 and $50 a team. The judging took into account technical merit, imagination, artistic ability, special effects and use of space.

“To offer $10,000 or $20,000 in prizes to take us back to our childhood, that’s what does it,” Kirstein said, explaining the appeal. “The material reward gets rid of your inhibitions. It takes you back to your 12th birthday and lets you do something creative out there.”

“It’s fun. It’s a turn-on,” said John Danna, whose team attached small rubber horns to their heads and called themselves the Flying Zambinnies. “It’s a new thing. It’s like a sport, but it has visible aesthetics.”