"Having sex on a beach is not romantic. I know because I tried it."

I’d like to say the moon was out and the breeze was soft but that would be a lie.

It was cloudy and also cloyingly warm. Humid. Sticky even.

I didn’t find myself having sex on a beach by choice. It was more by necessity.

Not ‘necessity’ in the sense that my sexual expedition would prevent some sort of natural disaster occurring. I didn’t save lives. I didn’t change the world with my penis.

Rather, a lady friend and I were getting hot and heavy in a playground and the beach was the only nearby place offering any form of privacy.

Let me explain…

Speaking of unusual places to have sex… the gym? Porn star Madison Missina discusses the gym sex trend with self-confessed ‘prude’ Carla G.S. on The Prude and The Porn Star. (Post continues after audio).

It was late 2015. I was in Byron Bay, a low-key hippie town on Australia’s East Coast, for Schoolies – a seven-day celebration traditionally taken by Aussie school-leavers once they finish Year 12.

As you can imagine, it’s a week of quiet nights playing cards to the soft hum of an acoustic guitar around a campfire. In bed by 10pm, latest.

Lol.

In reality it’s a balancing act of administering enough sleep between shots of tequila to prevent the human body from physically shutting down.

The layout of Byron Bay is such that there’s a small park and playground adjacent to the main beach, which is creatively named Main Beach.

In the park was a Red Frogs tent housing a DJ, ping-pong table, hydration station, and waffle-irons. The short grass of the park functioned as a make-shift dance floor/mosh pit hybrid.

Each night around 10pm, hoards of blissfully tipsy 18-year-olds flocked from their respective rental houses. Some in big groups, 30-strong, walking as a pack from a pre-drinks house party. Others in groups as small as five or six, were coming from a slightly-more-intimate ‘house dinner’.

By 10:30pm, we were all dancing in the park.

Because Byron Bay is so small, and a big chunk of Sydney schools had organised to be there at the same time, we more or less knew everyone we saw. Anyone new we met or pashed or danced with, you could bet was only separated by a single degree.

“You’re Alex’s friend?”

“Oh my god YAAAS [squeals].”

Oxygen in the middle of the dance pit was harder to come by than on the moon. The act of inhaling would do nothing but fill your body with the taste of other people’s sweat.

So I left.

I meandered 100m, over the rocks, down the sand towards the water, where I started chatting to a nice girl.

On Schoolies, being within arms reach of a member of the opposite sex is more than enough of an introduction to start hooking up. So we did.

Before long we wanted to find somewhere… a little more quiet. 

‘Why not a bed?’ I hear you ask.

Well. The layout of Byron is such that the rental houses commonly infested by Schoolies kids is a 20-minute walk from where everyone gathered.

And frankly, neither of us fancied a hormone-fuelled 20-minute-walk back to a bed beside a stranger with whom we intended to sleep with and never see again.

It’s Schoolies, after all. If we both had one thing in mind, it was trying to speak as few words to each other as possible after and before engaging in intercourse.

It was at this point – after recoiling at the thought of disjointed small talk – we made the extremely romantic decision to walk up the beach to find a spot away from vomiting teenagers to have drunken sex.

We picked a patch of sand further away from the water, which meant the sand was drier. This was the worst possible decision we could’ve made, and you can probably figure out why.

Popular culture has done sex a great disservice. Beach sex especially.

In my mind beach sex is smiley and warm and occurs after sipping Piña Coladas from coconuts with a novelty umbrella. You’re definitely not lying between patches of vomit dripping with sweat in the dark.

Clothes-wise? We were semi-clothed. The parts that mattered were exposed and everything else remained hidden… partly because we were too drunk to combat the intricacy of de-panting, and partly because it was dark and we didn’t care.

The sex lasted between forty to fifty seconds. It wasn’t the worst sex of my life, but it was certainly up there. The look on her face suggested she felt the same way.

The issue, you see, was the wind. It was a gusty evening and on top of the stickiness and sweat and fumbling... each time the wind blew, it swept up sand and deposited it in places sand is certainly not meant to be deposited.

In our drunken state, in the dark, upon an unfamiliar surface, we'd miraculously managed to sort out protection. So we were having safe sex but we were also having sandy sex.

Sand granules managed to infiltrate many orifices including the inside of the condom.

I feel far more sorry for her than myself, though. Because you know when you take a bag to the beach, and no matter how hard you try you can never quite get all the sand out?

Yeah.

If the girl I spent that night with is reading this - how are you going? I really hope the sand is all gone and please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

Please be assured the experience was highly unpleasant for me also, and I wish you all the best in your future sexual endeavours - beach or elsewhere.

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What's the weirdest place you've had sex? Let us know in the comments below.