A couple of Auckland brothers have drawn admiration from beachgoers at Mt Maunganui's main beach today after crafting a mammoth sandcastle on Boxing Day.
From sketching the structure out “on a bit of A4 paper” to starting construction at high tide yesterday at 9.30am, Jared and Paul Brandon built a two-metre high sandcastle for 10 hours in what is set to become a Boxing Day tradition for the pair.
The brothers' planning began on Christmas night over how to beat last year’s one-metre-high build on Boxing Day 2021.
The Boxing Day build has been met with awe from onlookers. (Source: Supplied)
Jared says he and Paul are “quite competitive” and wanted to supercede last year’s effort. The pair visited Bunnings to buy tools, buckets and a footstool and started googling sandcastle structures ahead of their build.
And it's drawn admiration and awe from locals and visitors.
“There’s a guy right now measuring how high it is with his beach umbrella,” Jared laughs.
“This one is 2 metres, so we had to buy some footstools to get up high enough and even had a builder’s level so it didn’t fall over,” Jared told 1News.
“We bought the biggest buckets we could use from Bunnings – the 150 litre was the largest and the smaller one was the classic household bucket.”
"The are a few tricks," Paul says, adding “It’s like two parts water to one part sand.”
Then there were spatulas for carving the windows, toothpicks for the roof piles and straws to blow away “excess sand”.
The pair continued their build until 8pm last night and unlike last year’s, it’s still standing.
“Time flew by really quick, it felt like we only worked for five hours, not 10," Paul told 1News.
He says he learnt the craft about eight years ago in the US when he worked for a hotel in California and was taught how to build sandcastles as an activity for kids.
“Now he’s taken that knowledge and grown with it and then he taught me. So for the past 4-5 years we will build a sandcastle once a year, if we can both find the time," Jared says.
The pair, both videographers, plan to go even further next year and hope to recruit wider family to help.
“We are trying to conjure more family to get involved to make a village in 2023 so we will try and train up my sister and brother-in-law to help us as they seemed keen this year.”
Paul was up at sunrise to capture morning snaps of the sandcastle and make sure it was still standing.
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