Playful and somber sand castle contest

The keys to an accomplished, award-winning sand castle: fine-grained sand, buckets of water, a few tools and patience.

"You need some fine motor skills. A lot of little kids can't manage that. It's not their fault," said Darrell O'Connor, 60, a semiprofessional sand castle artist. "But it's mostly patience."

O'Connor has won trophy after trophy in the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce's annual sandcastle contest, now in its 38th year. But in recent years, he's taken himself off the competitive treadmill and, instead, invited people to contribute their talents to a community sand castle. O'Connor got it going by doing the hard part — the uppermost turrets — and spent the rest of Saturday inviting and advising other artists.

"This is a group-effort sand castle," he said. "I step back every now and then, look at it, and see what it needs."

The contest is a well-oiled affair, almost 40 years into its existence. Young volunteers in orange vests offer to ferry buckets of sea water to the contestants, spread out along the sand across two city blocks. The water's important for structure: A dry sand castle is a falling-apart sand castle.

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Still, there were plenty of moments when large sand structures abruptly fell in on themselves, forcing the artists to start over. A wide, terraced castle John Dundore, a visitor from Pennsylvania, lost a detailed wall around 1 p.m., giving him only two hours to fix things before judges called a pause for all teams at 3 p.m.

Jeff Fake, a friend of Dundore's working on the same castle, said this was the first year they'd tried to build a sand structure. At the end, "I'll let the kids trash it," he said. "All day they've had to put up with 'don't touch it!'"

Not all the creations were castles. One team built a replica of a golf course, with crushed shells as sand traps and sea algae for greens. Others made sculptures of an octopus and a starfish.

Andy West, though, stuck to your classic castle, as he has for years in contests and for fun on beach days. His was a technical marvel, incorporating a bridge across empty space, which is not that easy to pull off when sand is your medium. The need to concentrate and focus as people all around him are distracting themselves with books, phones and beach games, he says, is what attracts him to the work.

"That's the great thing about this. I don't have those rabbit-hole distractions," he said. "You get honed in on it and lose track of time pretty quickly."

One sculpture was a somber one. Justin Chimics, his wife Emily, and David deVitry, from Marietta, Pennsylvania, built a model of the two tallest World Trade Center that fell on Sept. 11, 2001. They built not up but lengthwise as if the towers were laid down on their backs on the beach.

Justin Chimics said the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 was something they felt they had to acknowledge this year, instead of their usual shark design for the contest.

"I think this is the first year freshmen in high school hadn't even been born before it," he said of the 9/11 attacks. "A couple of young kids have come up and said, 'what's that?'"

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter@JamesFisherTNJorjfisher@delawareonline.com.