Sandcastle Day 2025 on Cortes Island

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - A hundred people turned out for Cortes Island’s Sandcastle Day on Saturday, August 23rd, 2025.

“It was a blast because all the families are so involved and all the kids are so involved. The day is absolutely beautiful. What's amazing is to see all the cooperation that the children have with each other and the creativity and the enjoyment that comes from this,” explained Nancy Silver, one of the judges.

“It is an another community building activity and what could be better and healthier then families creating together or children alone doing it and feeling so empowered.”

“Every person received some kind of award and that makes the little ones feel so great about themselves. They go on with their day, but something has changed in their lives and that is the beauty of this event.”

Cortes Currents also interviewed two of the participants and a spectator.

Monk and three of his friends were among the contestants:

“It was a very fun experience and we did our own thing on each part of the castle. We based it off of a book called ‘Percy Jackson.’ It's the Percy Jackson Palace, or Palace of Percy Jackson. We just rolled from there and built this really awesome different themed castle. We didn't really have a specific part that everybody worked on. We just did whatever we wanted.”

Zyla Schmidt was in a team that included her mother, grandmother, a lady named Heather and two other kids:

“It was really fun, It's kind of about the Children's Forest, like Enchanted Dragon Children's Forest, and I chose to do that because the Children's Forest is trying to get bought. I love it so much that I thought I'd make something based on that. I did a dragon. I didn't do wings, so it looked more like a dinosaur. There was going to be a city, then I turned it into a volcano because there wasn't enough time. We made paths and then raked out the rest. So you could go inside but not wreck the sculpture.”

Bruce Hayden brought a professional architect's eye to the event.

“One of the ones that I don't know who made it that is very beautiful is the two mountain, one of which looks like a volcano and village on the edge of the sea. The thing that I really like about it is that it's a beautiful integration of landscape and a sense of village. So it's humans meeting landscape in a really beautiful way. We had a good debate about whether it was a fortified village or not. My friend Heidi thought passionately it was a fortified village. I said, well, maybe it's a welcome spot that this is the place where you richly cleanse before you enter the sacred city on the edge of the ocean.”

Cortes Currents: Are there any highlights you can think of?

Nancy Silver: “For me it was with one group of kids who were so excited about what they did. They kept wanting to go deeper into the details, to take me through it and each part of it was like going into wonderland with them.”

“I felt like the children were really in their fantasy world and no one was putting any boundaries on it. When children can go into that experience so fully and grab the adult and try to share with them that world, that to me, was the best experience.”

A quick perusal of the Cortes Island Museum website showed there's been sandcastle days at Smelt Bay as far back as the summer of 1991, possibly earlier.