Want to get your hands on a whale? Fiesta is a chance to build your own.

If you want to help build a 60-foot whale out of sand, play carnival games that teach about the great water mammals, or pick up on whale lore from experts, the Cabrillo Marine Museum in San Pedro is the place to be Saturday.

Whale Fiesta ‘88, a celebration from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. that the museum hopes will draw 1,000 people, marks the end of the annual migration of the gray whale along the Pacific Coast. The event is free, but parking costs $4.

“It’s a way to get people aware that whales are here--where they are and what they do,” said Dan Zambrano, an aquarist who cares for sea animals at the museum. “We also want to get people out on the beach to build a whale.”

Creating the life-size sand whale on the beach near the museum--it’s a sperm whale this year--is always the highlight of the whale celebration, which has been held for 18 years. It takes hours to complete and a picture of the finished sculpture is taken from a helicopter.

The only requirement: bring your own shovel.

Bill Samanas, a teacher at Carson High School, molds the corps of enthusiasts into sand sculptors. “He tells people where more sand is needed and what part of the whale needs working on,” Zambrano said.

But sand isn’t all there is to the whale extravaganza. Experts from the American Cetacean Society--co-sponsors of the event--speak about whales, as does John Olguin, the longtime museum director who retired last year.

People from the whale rescue unit of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History will also be there to tell boaters what to do if they find a whale caught in a fishing net. “What you do is radio the unit and they will get people out there,” Zambrano explains.

Films will be shown, arts and crafts displayed and prizes awarded to children who have created their own models whales, dolphin or porpoises. First-grader Gina Koenig of West Los Angeles has entered a collection of whales made of carved soap, fabric, paper and even two potato chips joined to look like a whale.

There will be the traditional booths selling hot dogs, watermelon, whale T-shirts and souvenirs.

Carnival games with whale themes--devised by the museum staff to let people learn while having fun--are making their debut at this year’s fiesta.

Sperm whales eat squid, so in one game rubber squid are catapulted toward a waiting whale. In another feeding game, bean bags--representing a shrimp-like animal that blue whales eat--are tossed into the whale’s mouth. A burst-the-balloon game has each balloon placed on a map at a point along the whales’ migration route and another game relates to barnacles and lice, which are parasites on the gray whale. It’s a ring-toss game, with the parasites as targets.

Many events at Whale Fiesta ’88 will take place in the courtyard of the white stucco and corrugated-metal museum. Reproductions of a killer whale, hammerhead sharks and deep sea divers are suspended from the museum’s chain-link fencing over the courtyard, which is angled to simulate ocean waves.

The celebration will put the spotlight on the beachfront museum, which is operated by the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks and attracts up to 2,000 schoolchildren a day on field trips. With aquariums filled with sea life, a variety of exhibits and videos, and a simulated tide pool where people may touch such creatures as sea stars, sea urchins and mussels, the museum has the largest collection of Southern California marine life in the world.

“We’re here to teach people about the sea,” said Zambrano, adding that talking to children is the best part of his job. “Many of them have grown up here, but they’ve never been to the beach, and they’re flabbergasted that there are such animals,” he said.