Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Update – February 21st 2015

Yes we’re back at this awesome boardwalk park in sunny Santa Cruz! Lots of action has taken place since our last visit, including today’s massive Clam Chowder Cook-Off event, as well as the reopening of an entire section of the park. Without further adieu, let’s get started!

As mentioned above, today was the Clam Chowder Cook-Off, We arrived at the park five minutes before it’s official opening and the place was already massively crowded. All along the stretch of the Boardwalk, there were tents set up for cooking clam chowder.

As the day progressed, it became uncomfortably packed. On certain parts of the Boardwalk, where many chowder tents were set up, it became physically difficult to move around. It could take up to 20 minutes just to walk down the park once.

Hungry guests weren’t the only people clogging up the place. A large array of media was there as well, including local news stations. We weren’t the only ones carrying around fancy cameras today.

Some of the chowder tents had some very clever names, here are a few of our personal favorites.

An artist was hired to sculpt a bowl and spoon in the sand to honor the event.

The turnout for this event was truly remarkable and it was great to see. Not to mention the fact that the chowder was excellent! If you’d like to see the winners of the cook-off, click here.

Alright now onto the park in general. Sky Glider is still closed unfortunately. Too bad, there isn’t a much better setting than a gorgeous beach for a sky ride.

On the other hand, Fireball has reopened! we personally love this flat, and the airtime it provides is actually quite remarkable! All that spinning doesn’t hurt either.

The Giant Dipper started the day off running only its blue train, however later in the day, it switched to two train operations to accommodate the crowds brought in by the Clam Chowder Cook-Off. It’s still running as great as it has these past 91 years, never change Giant Dipper.

Down on the southernmost end of the park, that entire section has reopened! Without it, this park can certainly lose some of its appeal, so we were very pleased to see it open again!

Some attractions unfortunately have remained closed. Most notably Logger’s Revenge, and Rock-O-Planes.

If you look closely, Rock-O-Planes is missing some of it’s cages (for lack of a better word), presumably, they are being refurbished.

Rock and Roll has also reopened. This attraction always seemed a bit redundant to us, as the park also has Tsunami, a very similar centrifugal force based attraction.

The dark ride Cave Train Adventure has reopened with the area. It didn’t receive quite the work it may have needed, but it did have one major problem fixed, the AC! That ride used to be boiling no matter what the temperature outside was, especially its in final section, which is ironically set in an ice age. Now the ride is at least temperate, dare we say mildly chilly?

The other dark ride in that section of the park, Ghost Blasters, has also reopened. It’s a pretty standard Sally Corp shooter that doesn’t seem to have been refurbished.

Wait a minute… does this seaside park have three dark rides? Let’s not forget about Haunted Castle, which was drawing quite a crowd today.

Wipeout! is another one of the main attractions in the area that is also open once again. It is actually a very cool and unique spinning flat ride, with and indoor setting which makes it pretty disorienting.

Back on the northern end of the park, Undertow started out closed for a little while, but opened up at around one o’clock in all of its spinning goodness.

Double Shot was right in the middle of a large cluster of chowder tents, and thus a little hard to get to. Despite this, the ride had no lines all day. The process of loading and checking restraints took longer than waiting in the actual line.

The park has started their season pass advertising.

Speaking of chowder, don’t forget about the park’s other food that they have year round. We couldn’t help but grab some deep fried Oreos on the way out. If you’ve never had them, you’re missing out.

That’s mostly it for this update. Make sure to check out our other coverage of this awesome park, and leave your thoughts below! For the Twisted Colossus and Scream! Update from the same day, click here!