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Sun Splash slides into final weekends with admissions special

3 min read

Attempting to salvage what’s left of a season battered by a destructive fire and severe weather, Sun Splash Family Waterpark is hoping to lure visitors back by offering a special admission price for the final three weekends.

Starting this weekend, visitors can take advantage of a $10 admission to the park on Saturdays or Sundays. That’s a savings of $6.95 for residents and $9.95 for nonresidents off the regular admission price.

“It’s $10 for everyone, adults, kids, residents or not,” said park manager Sandra Greiner. “We’ve had calls from people wanting to know if we reopened after the fire even though we got the word out six days after the fire.”

The fire destroyed the main clubhouse building that housed the gift shop, kitchen and office space. The park closed for six days while it was cleaned up and temporary facilities brought in. The city is committed to having the new building ready when the park reopens next March, Greiner said, which is the park’s 25th anniversary season.

“The building already is being designed,” Greiner said. “It’ll be the same size, but we’ll move inner walls around for better functionality. The kitchen was small, so we are making it bigger because we serve a lot more food.”

The city’s insurance company will be onsite helping with the rebuild.

“That will take the pressure off the city so operations should go smoother,” said Greiner. “Insurance companies are unbelievable on rebuilds and negotiating for things. We could get more bang for our buck.”

The park’s Tot Spot attraction was supposed to be reconstructed last offseason, but hit a snag. The attraction was demolished but not constructed. Not having it hurt attendance this year as well, Greiner said.

“We are renaming it Pirates Cove because it is not just for tots any more,” Greiner said. “It will have 32 different interactive features – water canons, drop buckets overhead and spray guns with smart technology. If we have young kids at the attraction we can control the spray to a soft stream at eight feet, but if teens are there it can ramp up to 100 feet.”

Another factor that made this season the worst in the seven years Greiner has managed the park was the angry weather.

“You get crummy weather sometimes,” Greiner said. “I would rather close down for the day and take the loss rather than open up and have the whole day ruined by storms. I don’t mind the storms coming at 3 or 3:30, but they were coming at 1 o’clock. Forecasters predicted rain every day, too. That really hurt attendance.”

Kids went back to school a bit early this year and football started up to change family dynamics in other directions, too.

“I’m really looking forward to next year with the new building and (Pirates Cove),” Greiner said. “This was a very rough year. We might have done OK without the Tot Spot, but then we had the fire and the bad weather. We dealt with the issues as best we could.”

The park is at 400 Santa Barbara Blvd. and is open weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Sept. 25.

For more information visit www.sunsplashwaterpark.com or call 239-574-0558.