Local Focus: Meet the king of the sandcastle

Pāpāmoa Beach is a haven for locals who love the outdoors. From orcas to seals, you never know what's around the corner.

But during lockdown, when local wildlife wasn't hogging social media, Brett Muir's sand sculptures were.

"During lockdown especially, people were only able to communicate with their friends and family online," Muir said.

"I think that when they found my sandcastles on their neighbourhood beach that gave them something to add into the conversation that was positive and not about Covid.

"Although we have a phenomenal beach culture in New Zealand, we don't have a sand-sculpting culture. So there's not many doing sand art.

"Most do raked sand art, or perspective drawing on the sand and mandalas that are gorgeous.

"People aren't really used to it so it's a novelty to see sand sculpture on the beach. If you were in Europe or America, you might see it more often."

He said creating sand sculptures took time, effort and plenty of sand.

"It's not just creative, there's a bit of engineering and physics that goes on as well.

"The biggest issue with sand is that you've got to really make the foundations strong.

"Beach sand by its nature, every grain is round and they don't want to grip onto each other so you've got to pack a lot of water into the sand so you've got something to carve."

After seeing the response to his creations online, Brett will be offering group lessons over summer, something he says no one else in New Zealand is doing.

"As far as I'm aware I'm the only sand artist who is offering lessons on the beach.

"It's something that's done in resorts around the world where they've got beautiful soft-sand beaches and year-round tourism. But as far as I know, no one's else here is doing it.

"A lesson for me would be about two hours which is long enough to build a metre-high stack and then carve some cool features into that.

"Something that's two meters high would have a quarter of a ton of sand in it, something the size of a car would be five or six tonnes of sand."

Locals got a taste of what a lesson involved, which is no child's play.

"It was a lot of fun," Keilani Horne of Mount Maunganui said.

"It was actually harder than I thought. You go in thinking it looks easy but it collapsed quite a few times so yeah, it is a bit hard but a lot of fun."

Israel Cameron, also from Mount Maunganui, agreed.

"It was quite hard. With the stairs and stuff I thought I was going to smack it over."

"Definitely not easy," Tauranga resident Seungjin Lee said.

"It was hard to pull the buckets out of it and it was hard to carry the water."

Haroon Kim, also from Tauranga, said his favourite part of the day was "making the stairs and shaping the sandcastles."