The summer of 2018  in New Zealand was an extraordinary season. Temperature records seemed to break every day  and southerners took to the waters in numbers not seen for many years. But southern New Zealand humans were not to be the only visitors to the newly tepid southern beaches and harbours that summer.

Although not one of the scorchers of that month, January 2 was still hot by normal Dunedin standards. By late afternoon the tide was high, and the water pleasantly tepid after flowing in over sun warmed sand flats. Perfect conditions. I decided to take myself, my snorkeling gear, and my newest purchase, a tiny, waterproof video camera, down to the water to play. Others had the same idea so there was a decent crowd lolling in the water or kayaking around the communal boat jetty at the end of the street.  I chose a swimming spot a couple a hundred metres away from the rest, and, once suitably attired and accessorised, I slipped into the shallows and imagined myself a diver in a David Attenborough documentary, boldly investigating the ocean’s depths – all thirty centimetres of them.

During NZ summer Christmas periods, my siblings and I used to spend our holidays at the family crib (a holiday cottage for those who don”t understand southern NZ vernacular) close to the north eastern sand flats of Otago Harbour (Ōtākou). It was a long half hour drive from the city over a narrow and winding Portobello Road, good for pretty views of the harbour wildlife, bad for kids who suffered from car sickness. At high tide we would go swimming after having raced the incoming tide, at low tide we would be looking for flounders and crabs.

Decades later here I was in those waters again, drifting like a marine spy satellite over a busy little crab, who was probably wondering why the sun had suddenly disappeared, I was enchanted to find myself in the middle of a school of small silvery fish surfing the tide. My floating-in-watery-space act had fooled them into thinking I was just an odd shaped patch of kelp. On my moving the camera, parts of the school sheared to the left and right to avoid the suddenly animated kelp raft. I still managed to get some good video shots of them. I felt like I used to as a child, catching a glimpse of a Christmas present being wrapped just before Mum noticed me and shooed me away.

I returned to documenting the journey of my little crab but it had taken the opportunity to leg it back to its home hole. I was looking for another documentary subject when a flicker made me look to the side. The rock shadow on the sand below me moved. About sixty centimeters across, with the barb on its tail clearly visible, a stingray was lazily twitching the tip of one wing , enjoying the light and warmth of that extraordinary day.

My initial flight-or-fight reaction was flight, get back to the safety of the shore before this marine beastie decided to whack me with its tail, but an unexpected burst of common sense stopped me. It was not at all disturbed by my presence so I accepted that as an invitation of sorts, given by one creature to another –  as long as you let me be you may share this space with me. I quietly re-positioned myself and filmed a magical few seconds as this graceful little cousin of the giant manta rays glided elegantly over the sand below me before disappearing into the sea grass forest.

Later that evening, while searching the web, I discovered that I had probably seen a short tailed stingray, common to northern NZ waters, not so common in southern waters. An unusually large number of stingray sightings were reported in the harbour that summer. That same month there was a crowded symposium of stingrays around Poor Knights Islands, the largest in about fifteen years.