Posted on 03/17/2015 9:05:39 PM PDT by nickcarraway
After the weekend’s hot weather drew crowds to the San Diego coastline — and a man stung by a stingray in Pacific Beach was hospitalized — lifeguards are reminding swimmers how to avoid injuries at the beach. “The best thing to do is shuffle your feet especially if you’re entering an area where there are not a lot of other people,” said Lt. John Sandmeyer of the San Diego Lifeguard Service. “Because it usually means that the stingrays have not been disturbed there.”
Swimmers catching waves or running into the water and planting their feet in the sand are often the ones to get stung, he said.
Stingrays defend themselves by injecting the venomous spines on their tails and cause about 2,000 injuries a year in the United States. The painful wounds can take months to heal, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians.
If you are stung, the San Diego lifeguards advise soaking your wound in water as hot as you can stand. “And then we of course will also treat the wound for infection,” Sandmeyer said.
Stingray stings are a common occurrence, often up to 20 a day, he said.
“It’s variable but we get stingrays all the time, mostly during the summer,” he said. “It’s been unseasonably warm all year.”
Stay out of the water?
Works for me.
In Grand Cayman there is a tour that takes you to swim with stingrays (Stingray City, I think they call it). There are many...many stingrays that swim all around you. You swim with fins and goggles. I thought it was one of the most interesting tours there.
It’s snowing here. No chance of meeting up with any stingrays.
Why can’t they just put out some stingray free zone signs in the places people want to swim? Those stingrays have plenty of other areas they can use. It’s not fair.
I think I came closely stepping on a Stingray. I’m not sure if it was a Stingray. It had a clear translucent body. Not sure if Stingrays are clear. I recall running through the beach with my cousins and all of sudden, for some unknown reason, I immediately stopped and looked down and saw this thing that had a tail. I realize I almost came to stepping on it. I believe it was in the Santa Cruz Beach.
Sounds like a jellyfish. Santa Cruz, CA?
never walk. always keep your toes sliding under the sand.
I lived there for most of my life until my mid 20's and never heard of it.
Saw eagle rays scuba diving years later, sure.
Perhaps it was a Jellyfish, but it was an ugly thing I have ever seen lol. Yes it had to been at Santa Cruz because my cousins lived in San Jose at that time. I remember we picked them up and we drove down there.
Been there done that. 3 feet of water and hundreds of those things all around you. "Shuffle your feet on the sand and don't step on one" was the rule.
That’s it, slide your toe/feet under the sand as you walk; how a lot of surfers do it too in Australia.
Swim in fresh water.
I’ve never seen one and we have a boat in Ventura Harbor. We have tons of batrays and skates.
I’ve never encountered a stingray in the wild, but last time we went to the aquarium in Virginia Beach, we visited the ray tank. One of those little fellows kept swimming up to me, poking his head out of the water to be patted.
Did you oblige?
LOL, repeatedly!
Their coloration pretty much matches the background of the sand on the bottom, so it may appear that they are translucent and you're seeing the bottom through them.
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