Another Really BIG Sand Castle

This weekend my friend Tim and his son Gabe were visiting. We always go to the beach, weather permitting, and do some king of sand sculpture. Over the years Tim has continued to gather tools and knowledge about it, and we've all honed our skills, even though we don't use them often. Sunday we spent the whole day working on a very large castle. Tim brought roofing paper (which is a kind of tar paper I think) to make forms with, and we filled a large form, then a smaller one on top of that, as above, with Gabe and I shoveling sand and carrying water while Tim stomped and packed the sand, keeping it all well soaked. The technique worked surprisingly well, and it's one of the new ideas Tim found in this book:

which I recommend to anyone interested in sand sculpture. You can find a link to it below.

After the two forms were filled we built up a third layer by pancaking very wet sand in layers. The cylinder at the top here was from a bucket of wet sand, but that didn't hold up and was removed.

The build up took about three hours, at which point the sun departed and clouds and wind moved in, but we escaped any rain. We spent the next three hours carving. The taller tower is mine, the other tower is Tim's, and Gabe is working on lower shapes.

A better look at the whole structure, nearly as tall as us, and taller on the beach side. Gabe is adding sand bricks while Tim carves with one of his hand-made tools.

Later the forms were removed and carving continued down into the second level. The formed sand was very hard and great to carve, it worked quite well.

More carving down into the third level now. Tim's various carving tools were used for the columns and structural shapes on the walls.

Here's the third level mostly done, just needing finishing on the outer skirt and more details.

The completed castle as the clouds thickened around 6 PM. The round shapes were made with a large suction cup, another new technique we've just started using. Rotating the suction cup makes an easy spherical shape.

Here's the north side with Gabe and I some 10-15 feet behind, making the castle look even larger than it actually was.

And the best view from the south side, showing how the opening Gabe started was expanded into a two-level interior view with columns by Tim, with stairs leading to it. The scale is mismatched in places, much smaller at the top for instance, but we still think it looked quite good! And many passers-by agreed. As the light faded and a storm moved in, we reluctantly left our creation behind and in the hands of fate, well satisfied with our day's work, and quite tired and hungry, too!