AC repair inShellman Bluff, GA

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – A man in Georgia stunned beachgoers on Tuesday when he built a jaw-dropping sandcastle at Gould’s Inlet, East Beach on St. Simons Island.

It took Dylan “The Sandman” Mulligan approximately seven hours to construct his “Sandship” sandcastle. He got his inspiration from the Highclere Castle, known to the world as Downton Abbey.

“I have always been a Downton Abbey fan and an admirer of the architecture and history of Highclere Castle, as well as Lord and Lady Carnarvon’s efforts to preserve the castle, Mulligan told News4Jax. “I had always wanted to construct a replica of it, so I finally decided to make it happen.”

The sandcastle contained more than 100 gallons of water and was “without doubt one of the most detailed, labor-intensive sandcastles he had ever constructed.”

Mulligan has been sculpting sandcastles on the Georgia and Florida coasts for more than two decades. His popular creations have appeared at various points along the coast –– from the pristine and untouched wilderness of Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge and the tidal sandbars of Shellman Bluff in McIntosh County, Georgia, to East Beach on St. Simons Island, all the way to the beautiful beaches of Ponce Inlet.

He also published a picture book of on his creations called “The Georgia Sandman.”

His goal by building the sandcastles is to raise awareness for historic preservation.

“I seek to draw attention to preservation efforts in every community and at large, all of my personal efforts center on the restoration of the historic Glennwanis Hotel in my hometown of Glennville as a new home for our local museum,” Mulligan said. “All profits I am able to generate from the sale of my books and prints are donated to that nonprofit organization.”

For more information, you can visit his website, or find him on social media — Facebook and Instagram.

Fans of Fear the Walking Dead will be happy to hear that filming has officially begun for the series’s eighth season. This will mark the first season to film in Savannah, Georgia, which will make for some exciting changes in the location, which was set up in the penultimate episode of season 7 as our survivors headed out in rafts, boats, and the like to find a new, safe place to live.

Director Michael Satrazemis was a guest on Talking Dead: The Walking Dead Universe Preview special and confirmed that filming would begin this week. Casting calls have been ongoing for several weeks, so filming was expected to get underway soon.

Satrazemis and showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg have all used the word “reinvent” when talking about the upcoming season. With the filming location change, it is the opportune time to shake things up and give the series new life.

Fear the Walking Dead season 8

The seventh season occurred in a radioactive wasteland, created when cult leader Teddy Maddox (John Glover) detonated a nuclear bomb at the end of season 6. The characters were scattered about and took refuge in different areas as the bomb exploded.

During season 7, they all encountered numerous obstacles as they tried to find a way to survive, locate food and shelter and fight Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), who, like always, came out smelling like a rose in his Tower. There were several casualties in season 7, and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) departed the series as Madison (Kim Dickens) made her return.

The season ended with our survivors taking off to find someplace new to call home. The showrunners have stated that this season will be heavily centered around water. Which explains why the casting advertising stated, “Talent must be comfortable with heights, water, and riding in high-speed boats.” PADRE will also be heavily featured in season 8, and more will be revealed about the mysterious organization.

Next: Tales of the Walking Dead streaming early this week on AMC+

Follow Undead Walking on Twitter and sign up for the once-daily Undead Walking newsletter to avoid missing out on all things in The Walking Dead universe.

john.burke@savannahnow.com

The Shellman Bluff Baptist Church held its 72nd homecoming Sunday and dedicated it to a longtime member who to me is one of the classiest lady anglers I have ever met.

So congratulations to Nina Smith, a well-deserved recognition for one of the most congenial, sincere and pleasant individuals I have had the honor to know.

Much of what I have learned about inshore saltwater fishing can be attributed to what Nina and her late husband Phillip taught me during my early years of outdoor writing when many days were spent exploring the waters of Sapelo Sound and its many river systems.

I could fill a book with the articles written while fishing out of Kip’s Fishing Camp and with various members of the Smith family, in particular Nina and her mother-in-law, the late Ina Smith who also was an avid and expert angler – wonderful, exciting memories of some of the best inshore fishing I have ever experienced.

On the fishing front

Individual fishing reports continue to be few and far between, particularly over the past weekend with both weather and graduations keeping most of the angling fleet off the water.

We did receive a report from Jon Pannell, who told of he and Ed Sammons taking their boys offshore the previous Saturday looking for cobia. They spotted one but no hook-up, then found a school of keeper reds on the bottom, six harvested.

Another came from Capt. Judy Helmey (Miss Judy Charters, 912-897-4921), who told of her guides getting into the reds along with whiting and tripletail. Read her latest report online at www.missjudycharters.com.

We also received three fresh water catch reports, one of bluegill being caught in an area pond, the second of striper action at Lake Oconee, both reported by Tony Montford. We also got a message from Bulloch County resident Charles Holland: the redbreast were biting in the upper Ogeechee River waters.

With tides now at favorable fishing levels, a rising moon in the making (full moon is May 29) and the summer season about to make its debut this Memorial Day weekend, many fishing camps and marinas are preparing for a lot of boat anglers to be on the water.

Shrimp, outlook

The availability of live bait shrimp continue to be major concern along the entire coast, but as noted last week, live shrimp are now being imported from Florida.

Trey Coursey, at Shellman Fish Camp at Shellman Bluff in McIntosh County (912-832-4331), last week said he was arranging for shrimp to be shipped. We now hear that several bait suppliers will be among those importing for the Memorial Day weekend.

We strongly suggest that anglers wanting live bait shrimp to contact their suppliers in advance of any planned outing.

In addition, brown shrimp are now showing up in many of the rivers and creeks along the coast. While most are still too small for bait purposes, early indications are fair to good concentrations appear to be developing.

Phone calls to several bait suppliers on Monday indicated they would be testing area waters this week to see if any are now large enough to harvest and if they are plentiful enough to warrant harvesting.

The biggest threat for the Memorial Day weekend and even through the first four days of June is precipitation, with the Weather Channel predicting showers and scattered thunderstorms Saturday through June 4.

Red snapper

NOAA Fisheries is requesting comments on a proposal to allow limited open red snapper fishing in federal waters of the South Atlantic on weekends (Friday through Sunday) beginning in July for both the commercial and recreational sectors.

If approved, the proposal would set the recreational bag limit at one red snapper per person per day, and would apply to both private and charterboat/headboat vessels (the captain and crew for hire may retain the recreational bait limit).

Total catch limit of red snapper would be set at 42,510 fish, of which the recreational sector would be allowed 29,656 fish. The commercial annual catch would be 124,815 pounds, whole weight (12,854 fish), with trip limits set at 75 pounds, gutted weight

The proposal also calls for the commercial season to open the second Monday in July while the recreational sector would open the second Friday in July, the number of weekends to be allowed not indicated in the proposal. Both seasons would close when annual catch limit are projected to have been met.

Comment period closes June 18 and may be submitted electronically (www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=NOAA-NMFS-2017-0148, click the “Comment Now” icon, complete the required fields, then enter or attach comments), or mail comments to Frank Helies, Southeast Regional Office, NMFS, 283 13th Ave. South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701.

John Burke can be reached at 912-655-8505, or by email at jburke89@comcast.net.

ADEL, Ga. (WALB) - The boys are back again: Alexander Kane, Michael Donnavan and Vernon Davis are the founders of Workhorse Cinema, a local, independent production company. They are bringing some action to southwest Georgia.

They’re currently working on their 11th movie in Adel, and it’s called “72 hours.”

Actor and producer Alexander Kane says creating jobs and opportunities for locals in our region is what they strive to do.

“Anybody that wants to work in the movie business, we’re here to help you achieve those dreams. There’s been so many locals since the last two or three movies that have join our crew and I get more excited each time I watch a local start with us and grow into a bigger and better career,” Kane said.

There are a lot of explosions, gunfire and stunts on set. Kane told WALB about how the crew stays safe with all the action taking place.

He says there are absolutely no live bullets on set. But when the viewer watches the film on the big screens, it looks like the real thing. He says that’s all a part of the movie magic.

“You want to have a top stunt team if everyone’s qualified to do that you vet them. In your armor, in your entire team, you need to vet them heavily and make sure that all protocols are followed to a ‘T’. Nowadays, it’s even more important to take extra precautions,” Kane said.

Several of the crew members traveled far to get to South Georgia just to film this movie. WALB caught up with the movie’s director about his role. He says he has over 15 years under his belt.

Luis Da Silva is one actor that you may remember from the fifth “Fast and Furious” movie “Fast Five” where Da Silva played the character, “Diogo,” that drove a 911 Porsche. He’s now made his way to Southwest Georgia for the first time filming on set. He says he has many other projects coming up soon as well in the coming weeks. He raved out how great of a team Workhorse is to work with.

“We’re shooting “72 hours” which is an action film it’s going to be a ton of other projects coming in this town. Great crew, great producer, I’m happy to be in this town it’s beautiful here,” Da Silva said.

Kane says they are always looking for background and inspiring actors. If you or someone you know is interested visit, you can visit the WHC website to get in contact with the crew.

Copyright 2022 WALB. All rights reserved.

From a young age, Dylan Edward Mulligan has been the architect and builder of some pretty incredible structures. Sadly, not one of his painstaking creations have stood the test of time.

But that’s OK with the Glennville native, who graduated from the University of Georgia’s School of Law in 2018. The foundations for Mulligan’s developments are hard-sand beaches and the materials used for construction are generally that selfsame beach sand, occasionally augmented with marsh mud.

Known as “The Georgia Sandman,” Mulligan has built by hand with sand countless castles and replicas of historic buildings, primarily at Shellman Bluff in nearby McIntosh County and in other parts of Coastal Georgia, and at Ponce Inlet in Florida. Mulligan grew up spending summers on the Shellman Bluff’s tidal sandbars, where he can recall spending 12-hour days devoted to his latest sandcastle.

“I started making castles by turning buckets upside down and then I learned how to make drip castles out of mud by letting mud drip through your fingers,” said Mulligan, who made his first drip mud castle at the age of 4. “I’m basically self-taught and it was trial-and-error from there. I learned gradually how to build towers and then walls, and then the towers and walls got bigger and more elaborate. And it’s been a steady progress since then.”

One of six attorneys (and the youngest) in Tattnall County, Mulligan spent years perfecting his sandcastle craft and two years ago branched out to building granular facsimiles of historic buildings. One of his most recent projects depicted UGA’s School of Law building, which not surprisingly turned out to be a social media hit among Georgia folks.

Mulligan, a Glennville-Tattnall historian, said it took him nearly four hours to build the law school replica in mid-July on the Juliaton River at Shellman Bluff.

“There are not many spots where you can build anything but there’s one isolated area I’ve identified that’s got a lot of good marsh mud mixed in and you can build there,” said Mulligan, who serves on the board of trustees of the Glennville-Tattnall Museum and the Friends of the Glennwanis Hotel. “I almost messed up with this one. I didn’t get in my normal spot – I got a little too far back. And I hit a pocket of nothing but marsh mud. That’s partly why if you look at the pictures, the infrastructure itself is a lot darker than what I normally build. It’s a thick, black soft clay.

“I made the mistake of trying to build that thing with this mud. It took me forever because it holds water so much I couldn’t get it to dry and I could hardly get it to hold its shape, It was a real challenge getting it shaped and getting it carved, but I finally managed to get it together.”

Before tackling the law school project, Mulligan made a Fourth of July recreation of a favored campus spot from his undergraduate days at Georgia Southern.

“I figured since I went to Georgia Southern and UGA, I’m going to do the law school at Georgia and the Pittman Building at Southern,” he said. “A tribute to my two alma maters.”

Mulligan admits that in his early castle-building days, he cursed the daily tide that reclaimed his creations. But he long ago came to grips with the realities of his passion and he can abide the eventual-but-eternal outcome.

“I reconciled myself to that a long time ago,” he said. “When I was young and first started building, that was something I dwelled on all the time and it would run me crazy trying to stop the tide. One time, when I was 10 or 11, some cousins and I were working on a castle and the tide was coming in. So we put up a massive seawall all the way around the castle trying to prevent the tide from coming in. We did a pretty good job – we held it off for a while. But you are not going to beat the tide.

“I came to realization a long time ago that nothing on this earth is permanent, especially when you build it out of sand. It’s a natural cycle. When you build something like this, part of that process and part of that cycle is seeing it go back to what you made it of, the sand itself.

“There’s an old saying – ‘Time and tide wait for no man.’ And a friend of mine, Kathleen Russell, the editor of the Darrien News, modified that to say that ‘time and tide wait for no sandman.’ That’s become one of my slogans.”

While building castles from the sand is a solitary pursuit, Mulligan has found that his labors do spark a good bit of conversation.

“It’s a people activity because it always draws a crowd,” he said. “Wherever I’m at, if there are other people there, they’re always popping by wondering what I’m doing and taking pictures. You get to meet a lot of people and talk to a lot of people.”

Mulligan published a photo book of his many sandcastles and proceeds from sales of the book benefit the Glennwanis Hotel as a home for the Glennville-Tattnall Museum. For more information, visit www.thegeorgiasandman.square.site.