Kylie Walsh, 13, was on her back and half-covered in sand and seaweed. For nearly two hours, she lay still, unmoving. The sun blared overhead.
Becoming a sand-sculpture mermaid, it turns out, is difficult work.
Walsh and two of her friends were competing against hundreds of people organized in 65 teams Thursday, July 31 in Edmonds’ free annual sand sculpture contest.
As she lay still, Walsh’s friends Ashlee Hagstrom and Jill Morris smoothed a mermaid body an inch thick over her stomach, coating it in seaweed.
“You are going to have a really funny suntan,” Hagstrom said.
Walsh laughed in agreement, but her laughter cracked the sand-plaster of her tail.
“Stop! You are always laughing!” Hagstrom screamed.
“Shut up!” Walsh shot back.
The teams were competing for six buckets filled with salt-water taffy from sponsor Nama’s Candy Store.
The beach was so full of competitors that some teams crowded a sand-spit very close to the water.
At 10 a.m., that looked like a good idea. The wet sand was easier to mold.
By noon, however, the tide was rising quickly, and judging was just beginning.
Jesse Winter, 14, and two of his friends from Lake Stevens had built a massive, turreted sand castle that was so large the entire team could stand inside of it.
By the time judge Phil Lovell came to see the castle, though, just a minute after noon, the tide was thirstily devouring the castle’s walls, even as Winter and his friends furiously shoveled sand in the tide’s way.
The boys were laughing, Lovell was laughing, and so was Winter’s mother Judi.
“They are like the captains of a ship,” she said. “They are not going to give up — even though it is going down.”
Within minutes, the sand castle was swamped, the once-proud walls reduced to unrecognizable lumps.
Lovell’s impression? “Big,” he said. The Winter castle didn’t win.
The biggest sand castle on Marina Beach did win a bucket of taffy, however.
The “Alien Spaceship” entry built by group from Mukilteo eventually stood four-feet tall and as thick as a redwood tree.
An Identified Flying Object, the spaceship featured port-hole windows and a series of aliens who had been tossed onto the beach from a presumed crash landing.
As impressive as the final product was the tool shed brought by team leader Paul Kramer: seven shovels, numerous rakes, brooms, copper wire, buckets, yard signs and 8.5-inch by 11-inch messages of hope. The messages, like “All you need is love,” were placed over the aliens.
The whole production was grand, agreed team member Jody Levy.
“We thought it was overkill, but Paul kept saying, ‘Keep going, keep going,’” Levy said. “We did.”
Reporter Chris Fyall: 425-673-6525 or cfyall@heraldnet.com
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