The sandcastle outside of Marc Dansereau's home in Salmon Arm.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Marc Dansereau
September 25, 2022 - 7:02 AM
Take a drive along 1 Avenue in Salmon Arm and you may be surprised to find a sandcastle, complete with stained glass, towers, doors and more.
Marc Dansereau has been building sandcastles since 2015 to raise awareness for the Shuswap Hospice Society after his youngest daughter Bernadette died from cancer.
READ MORE: Salmon Arm father's sandcastles are metaphors for life
This year, Dansereau’s sandcastle outside of his house has captured the attention of the online community.
Salmon Arm resident Amber Erickson saw the castle for the first time earlier this month.
“I was impressed with it, I didn’t think it was that scale, that huge, to see how big it was and that much detail of it, I decided to whip out my camera and take a photo,” she said. Her post in a Salmon Arm Facebook group has gathered almost 200 reactions.
“I thought why not show the rest of the community what this guy is doing?”
The sandcastle outside of Marc Dansereau's home in Salmon Arm.
Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Marc Dansereau
Because of the pandemic, Dansereau built one last year in his yard and wanted to build one at Salmon Arm’s wharf but the water was too high to get the sand in, so it has returned to the spot in his yard.
He hopes to build awareness for the Salmon Arm hospice society and also recruit volunteers, and fundraise for the non-profit.
Each year he tries to change up the design and this year is the first time he’s added stained glass to the castle.
“Now my brain, the wheels are turning, and oh my gosh, the possibilities of what I might be able to do is getting quite exciting,” he said.
“It’s been a lot of fun, I’ve met the most amazing people through doing this.”
One couple he talked to as they watched him build the castle told him they also lost a six-year-old daughter to cancer.
“Meeting people at a sandcastle is a very disarming location; people are attracted to it and it lets your guard down and it has kind of been my way in to meet the most interesting people,” he said. “It’s been a wonderful blessing to me in my life.”
Dansereau’s family helps with the shoveling and his youngest daughter, now eight, looks exactly like Bernadette. The pair spends time creating the castle together. They always call it Bernadette’s castle, he said.
The creation would take him roughly two weeks to make, but he works full time so it’s taken him two months on evenings and weekends. It’s 60,000 pounds of sand he has to shovel.
“That’s why it’s there, to bring smiles,” he said. He would love to train more sand sculptors to build sandcastles in more locations outside of the Shuswap.
His current sandcastle will stand at the same location until he decides to rebuild another next March.
Marc Dansereau at work
Image Credit: Image credit: Marc Dansereau
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