THE VERDICT -- judge gardner

I’ve been in some scary situations, but never have I been so frightened

as one time when I was diving.

When one spends one’s childhood in a mud flat environment, one becomes

familiar with stingrays or, as we kids called them, “stingarees.”

At low tide, no problem. Walk across the mud. However, come high tide

with the mud covered with eight to 12 inches of water -- watch out!

One does not lift one’s foot. One slides the foot along in the mud. Sting

rays are bottom feeders. They lie on the bottom, waiting for something

palatable to swim by. However, they do not wish to be disturbed.

Man comes along, lifts his foot, places it down on a sting ray, and all

hell breaks loose. The ray’s tail comes up, and a sharp, bony growth at

the end of that tail buries itself in the foot or leg of the offending

man.

Contrary to some stories, there is no venom in the tail. It cannot be

compared to a snake. Still, I can testify it hurts, and if the foot is

not immersed in hot water, it can become quite painful.

After a lifetime of carefully sliding my feet along, I got careless while

getting cockles. It was a small ray that merely struck me on the foot. I

thought I would be a macho man, and the pain would go away. But after

about 10 minutes, I discovered that instead of going away, the pain was

becoming more intense.

So I drove over to the Newport pier where old Dr. Richter stayed open on

Sunday just to treat stingray stings. There was an abundance of rays next

to the pier, and old Dr. Richter charged 50 cents to squeeze the “guck”

out and stick the leg in hot water with some kind of white disinfectant

in it.

And that was a small one. I remember from my San Onofre days that a man

stepped off his surfboard and onto a large ray that hit him high in the

calf. He passed out and had to be taken to the county hospital.

Something even more terrifying happened to me in the early ‘30s. There

was an abalone canning plant on the bay at Ensenada. It was on stilts,

and the people who ran the cannery just threw all the uncanned parts of

the abalone into the bay. I had completed my diving for the day and was

just moseying along in the shallow water, thinking I might bump into a

spot fin croaker or something similar for dinner.

I wasn’t paying much attention to where I was going until I noticed I had

drifted into the abalone packing plant. I looked down, and there I was,

floating about three feet over a few hundred stingrays.

I didn’t move a finger or a toe. If I did anything to upset those

hundreds of stingrays, they would come off the bottom with tails cutting

the water like whips. I would get stung in the face, chest, stomach and

any other part of the anatomy.

Rattlesnakes have struck at me twice -- once at my hand and once at my

foot. I was scared then, but it was just me and a rattlesnake. Here, it

was me and about half the stingray population of Mexico.

I thought I was scared when a moray eel came sliding and snapping down on

my barbless steel spear, but that was easy. Just abandon the spear. You

can’t abandon a couple hundred stingrays about three feet from your face

mask.

I got out of the mess by moving slowly, ever so slowly, barely breathing

until I was out of that stingray nest. As I say, it was the most

frightened I’ve ever been.

* JUDGE GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and former judge. His column

runs Tuesdays.