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It is many years since I went skinny-dipping with a chum. It was at the end of a very hot midsummer day when we may have had a drink or four of his lethal home-made beer.
We walked out to the Ray, a sandbank near Southend, stripped off and dived in. The water sobered us up fairly quickly and we swam out to a small boat bobbing nearby, climbed in and rested for a while. Our rest was short-lived for we realised that the sandbank was becoming somehow narrower and that the tide was coming in. Boy!, did we jump back in the water and head for shore fairly quickly!
It was a wonderful evening for, as the sun disappeared and the lights of Southend lit the mud we now had to stumble across, something very magical happened.
Every footprint became brightly lit by a blue-white luminescence. We stopped at one point and looked back to where the tide was approaching in the distance. There behind us was a trail of footprints lit by enchanting but slowly fading lights in the mud.
We came to no harm that memorable evening, despite foolishly misjudging the tide, except getting our legs covered in mud up to our knees.
Which cannot be said for a Canadian tourist in New Zealand who decided to skinny-dip in the sea and then have a snooze on the beach afterwards in his unclad state.
This poor man woke to find his member had become swollen and painful with a red mark on it which suggested that it had been bitten. By the time he reached the nearest hospital, in the northern town of Dargaville, his member was severely swollen, his blood pressure was up and his heartbeat racing.
Doctors decided that he had been bitten by a katipo, a Maori name meaning ‘night-stinger’, a rare native spider related to the Australian redback and North American black widow spiders. The man then spent the next sixteen days in hospital suffering from a potentially fatal heart inflammation. After treatment with anti-venom medicine, he was able to return safely home to Canada.
By comparison, my skinny-dipping adventure all those years ago was thankfully memorable in a entirely different way!
.
It is many years since I went skinny-dipping with a chum. It was at the end of a very hot midsummer day when we may have had a drink or four of his lethal home-made beer.
We walked out to the Ray, a sandbank near Southend, stripped off and dived in. The water sobered us up fairly quickly and we swam out to a small boat bobbing nearby, climbed in and rested for a while. Our rest was short-lived for we realised that the sandbank was becoming somehow narrower and that the tide was coming in. Boy!, did we jump back in the water and head for shore fairly quickly!
It was a wonderful evening for, as the sun disappeared and the lights of Southend lit the mud we now had to stumble across, something very magical happened.
Every footprint became brightly lit by a blue-white luminescence. We stopped at one point and looked back to where the tide was approaching in the distance. There behind us was a trail of footprints lit by enchanting but slowly fading lights in the mud.
We came to no harm that memorable evening, despite foolishly misjudging the tide, except getting our legs covered in mud up to our knees.
Which cannot be said for a Canadian tourist in New Zealand who decided to skinny-dip in the sea and then have a snooze on the beach afterwards in his unclad state.
This poor man woke to find his member had become swollen and painful with a red mark on it which suggested that it had been bitten. By the time he reached the nearest hospital, in the northern town of Dargaville, his member was severely swollen, his blood pressure was up and his heartbeat racing.
Doctors decided that he had been bitten by a katipo, a Maori name meaning ‘night-stinger’, a rare native spider related to the Australian redback and North American black widow spiders. The man then spent the next sixteen days in hospital suffering from a potentially fatal heart inflammation. After treatment with anti-venom medicine, he was able to return safely home to Canada.
By comparison, my skinny-dipping adventure all those years ago was thankfully memorable in a entirely different way!
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