CAPITOLA — Visitors from all over the Monterey Bay and beyond came out to play in the sand Saturday at Capitola Beach for the Capitola Beach Festival. The weekend-long event began early Saturday morning with the Little Wharf 3-Miler Fun Run and continued on the beach with a sand sculpture contest, scavenger hunt and kids art contest.

“It’s so fun to see all the families out here today,” said Capitola Beach Festival President Mary Beth Cahalen. “We have a lot of new events this year, corn hole, disc golf, and the scavenger hunt is new too. The best part is that we have a totally different scavenger hunt tomorrow, so if you do it today, you can do it tomorrow too.”

Festivalgoers could also watch as float building teams constructed their barges on the beach, after it was determined Soquel Creek was too low for the usual nautical parade. The team from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History stationary float was a callback to the Victorian-era Venetian water festivals of Santa Cruz and Capitola past.

“We are working with the artist collective MCXT who have been doing an art and history residency,” said Everett Ó Cillín, exhibition and projects manager at the MAH. “We thought about all the different types of festivities that have been on the waterways so we have flowers because of the Begonia Festival and it’s also inspired by the Venetian water carnivals that happened in the late 1860s here in Santa Cruz. We also have nods to the Indigenous history of the area as well.”

Young artist Olivia Kennedy, 11, was admiring the MAH team’s ornate float before the children’s art competition. She was thinking about sketching the floral barge for her entry in the contest, but hadn’t committed to the idea. She was afraid that when the competition started, she’d get artist’s block and wanted to make sure she had a fallback idea just in case.

“I just don’t want to black out and get artist’s block because that is the worst,” said Olivia. “I just want to do well.”

More than 20 sand sculpting teams lined Capitola Beach with various themes. There were sand dragons, scaled-down cities, towers and castles designed to accommodate both humans and mermaids, which was being sculpted by father-daughter team Robert and Lilah Pasquale of Santa Cruz.

“The original plan was to replicate the village in a castle form, but the tide came up and we had to…