Sand in My Boots, the music festival that took the place of Hangout this year in Gulf Shores, saw fewer arrests than in previous years.

Gulf Shores Police Department recorded 37 arrests and 45 charges over the three-day festival period. Tickets sold out in 90 minutes in October, capping daily attendance at 40,000.

Gulf Shores Interim Police Chief Dan Netemeyer said it was a "different crowd this year" mostly because of the "dynamic" of people in attendance.

"(It) was off-duty police officers," he said, "... firefighters, teachers, nurses, you know, schoolteachers, school administrators. This was the type of crowd we had in town this weekend. Very well behaved.”

Festival goers flocked to Gulf Shores Public Beach from all over the country, as well as internationally, and while there was a new option for residents in Baldwin, Mobile and Escambia counties to buy tickets pre-sale, Monday was also the busiest day in Pensacola International Airport history, setting a travel day record of 15,400 passengers.

The airport’s TSA wait time was 13.11 minutes, faster than it took many to traverse the sand between stages. In a social media post, the airport noted that 85% of Baldwin County departures go out of Pensacola.

Of the 45 charges filed, most (26) were for unlawful possession of a controlled substance, followed by six charges for public intoxication, underage possession of alcohol (4) and disorderly conduct (4).

Of the total arrests, 78% were male, and 20 of them were felonies.

The number marks a drop from last year when city and county police made a total of 94 arrests in 2024, 59.6% of whom were male. The most common charge (there were 131 charges total) was for unlawful possession of a controlled substance (78), followed by possession of marijuana-second (12) and public intoxication (12).

Last year's 94 was lower than the 107 arrests made in 2023 and 133 in 2022, GCM reported last year.

"In years past, we've [had] a group of teenagers here with their daddy's credit card. The folks here this here had their own credit card,” Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft said Monday. “... They were not hoping Daddy bails them out if they get in trouble. They were on their own, and they were that much different in age, and that's the reason you hear so much better quality of an audience."

Gulf Shores Fire Chief Mark Sealy said the numbers of festival attendees who required medical assistance also decreased this year.

Medical tents were set up throughout the festival site. Here, a group of Coastal Alabama Community College nursing program students volunteered together.

KAYLA GREEN / GULF COAST MEDIA

"One of the things we did because we didn't want to overwhelm the hospital there [at the festival] is – with so many heat emergencies or heat issues – we put tents outside of the stages on both ends, and we had those manned,” he said.

These tents served as cool-off and hydration zones or rehydration, Sealy said. If conditions were serious or worsened in the hydration tent, patients were moved to the triage tent.

Craft said heat issues were the main problem in the hospital group because "you're going to have that no matter how old you are," especially on the beach and in the sun.

Sand in My Boots was curated by country music superstar Morgan Wallen, who headlined the event Sunday night following other main acts Post Malone, Hardy, Brooks & Dunn and Diplo. Hangout Fest started in 2010 as an effort to bolster tourism to the Gulf’s beaches after the BP oil spill.

The switch to a more country-focused lineup and experience was spurred by locals and city officials who said that's what they wanted. This was the last year that AEG Presents had a contract with the City of Gulf Shores to bring the festival here, so now the discussions will begin on whether they will get a new contract and, if so, for how long and in what format. The company, which has produced Hangout and managed it on-site since 2015, also puts on Stagecoach and California's Country Music Festival.

"We have not decided what to do with that other than we will be listening to a pitch by the Hangout group and their partners tomorrow [Tuesday, May 20], and we will analyze what they're asking, and we will be approaching the community within the next couple of weeks to try and have some type of meeting for public input,” Craft said.

He said the meeting with the festival group will tell the city how much of a financial impact the event had on the city's net worth. This will then be presented at a public input meeting.

"[The festival] has traditionally added somewhere around $1 million of net money to the city," he said. "... That's net money that we have to build other things with."

Craft said it will ultimately be "up to the community" to decide if that is "the way we need to get" the net money.

"We'll have to work together as a community to decide do we want to keep doing this or not. It would have to be like we were this year," Craft said. "It would have to be – absolutely – this same group."