Cannon Beach Sand Castle Fesitval

Several years ago, my family got to see the end product of the sand castles left over from the festival completely by accident.  I thought they were amazing.  So this year, I have been doing my best to figure out when the festival was (they aren't super good at publicizing it).  I talked JD into going in a trade where last weekend we had to be 'responsible' and do things like clean and go though paperwork, and other boring grown up stuff like that.  Incentive was that we could go to the Sand Castle Festival. 
JD was up and ready to go at 5:15 AM, for those of you who are familiar with JD's sleeping habits, this is amazing.  He didn't want to mess with crowds and parking so we found ourselves in Cannon Beach slightly after 7, and yes, we did get an amazing parking spot, and no, there was not immediate competition when we first arrived though by 8 all available spots were taken.
We ate breakfast at the American Legion Lodge, it was really good they had eggs, sausage, bacon, biscuits and gravy, fruit, and pancakes.  It was buffet style so JD got lots of sausage.  We were on the beach at 8 when they let the "Masters" begin their competition.  They had prebuilt boards and rings for packing sand and a ton of water buckets to mix the sand.  9:00 let all other participants begin their work. A back hoe came in and dug several water holes though we did find a group that had created their own pumping and hose system that resembled a step machine. 
The rest of our day consisted of watching the different group's 'castles' take shape.  There was a Candy Land one (won the Masters and $1200 ), The Other Side of the Stack that was a pretty cool castle of Haystack Rock with a fairy tail style back side, a golfer in a sand trap, a bath tub being drained, tiki men, bears taking over a camp site, a 60th birthday cake among many others.  It was fascinating to see the Master's build up and shape their sand formations.   We had a lot of fun, staying until the tide came back in, we will have to see where we are this time next year and if we will be able to go again.