July 3, 2009 Salisbury Beach kicks off weekend with sand sculpting Play video

(NECN: Peter Howe, Salisbury Beach, Mass.) - Finally the sun was shining again Friday afternoon as Independence Day Weekend kicked off here, the endless rain breaking just in time for Sean Fitzpatrick to get started on what may be New England's biggest sand sculpture this weekend.

On the median at the end of Beach Road, Fitzpatrick has trucked in 24,000 pounds of special fine-grained sand from a New Hampshire quarry. Through the end of the day Sunday, he will be working to turn it into a sculpture of a schooner with billowing sails on one side, and a carousel with detailed horses on the other side.

Don't hate him, but Sean's managed to make since 2005 a full-time business out of playing with sand and snow, Fitzy's Snowman Sand Sculptors in Saugus, Mass. He gets corporate sponsors to pay for his installations, like NECN owner Comcast Corp., which is sponsoring the Salisbury Beach sculpture.

Here at Salisbury beach, it's part of the kickoff of a summer that local businesswoman Donna Abdulla, owner of Joe's Playland arcade, says felt like it got rained out endlessly. Asked how long it's been raining, she said, "I'd say a month. Twenty, twenty-five days. It's fantastic, absolutely fantastic, to see the sun again.''

Abdulla's father-in-law and his brother started Joe's 80 years ago. To boost the rain-delayed, economy-challenged summer season, Salisbury businesses are paying for beach concerts and fireworks every Saturday night of the summer. "I think

all of us know we're very weather-dependent, and we're just hoping to move on and get some pleasant people and good times,'' said Abdulla, who serves on the local chamber of commerce.

While he's creating the schooner/carousel sculpture, one of Sean Fitzpatrick's assistants is also teaching children some advanced techniques for beach sand sculptures. The sand he's using is a special fine-grained sand, not regular beach sand, but some of the tools they show that help make beach sculptures extra-special are:

• using a sharp object like an artist's palette knife (typically an under-$1 item at an art shop) to shape sand.
• cutting away from the base of sculptures so they look like separate objects sitting on top of the beach, not growing out of the sand.
• paying close attention to etching to create shadows to give detail to monotone sand tones.
• using a section of PVC pipe instead of a bucket to make castles; because it's open on both sides it doesn't have a vacuum that makes it harder to pull off the form shaping the sand.
• and what Fitzpatrick calls "a self-propelled silicon-particle-dispersing device." That is: a straw. Using a straw to blow off stray bits of sand from your sculpture makes it look all the sharper.

(With videographer Sean Colahan)