Fred Mallett has been competing in Masters level sand sculpture events since 2002. Seeing a Guiness World record sand sculpture attempt in progress on the beach in South Padre Island Texas (home of the Sons of the Beach sand castle wizards) gave him the bug, and sculpting sand quickly became a passion.
He lives on the island town of Port Aransas Texas where he performs occasional Sand Sculpting jobs for hire and enjoys several competitions a year to both make money and find an artistic release in the form of a multi-day retreat from his usual job of teaching engineers to write computer programs to analyze massive amounts of data.
2008 was his best contest year to date, placing in the money at every solo event entered. 2009 will go down as a year of injuries. As of the end of 2009, he has competed in 54 masters level competitions and placed in 29 of them.