QotD: What's the most amount of sand you've ever had in your swimming trunks?

This is a true story: now listen. We were shipwrecked on a desert island, me and a bunch of others, only it wasn’t all full of palm trees and what-not. Nothing but sand, sand, and more sand. Okay, there was a rock or two. But nothing green, nothing growing, not even sand fleas, which at least was a blessing there.

We had plenty to eat: there were so many fish you could just walk out a ways and grab a couple. Nothing to burn, so it was sushi time pretty much all the time. One of the women found some seaweed she said was okay to eat, and pretty soon we were all chowing that down as well. Plain sushi morning, noon and night can get pretty tired.

It was an entertaining group, at least. No horrid old bores going on about some war last century and how all the boys were good ‘uns. We basically spent all our time telling stories and playing games, getting brown and browner, and quarreling over who got the red fish and who got the blue fish. Made no difference, really, but it was something to do.

Thing is, clothes aren’t made of iron plate, and they began to degrade. The guys weren’t too worried about this, but the women had some idea about clothes keeping us civilized. We basically offered to give the women all our clothes, but they weren’t too keen on that, either. A couple of them set to work trying to find an alternate fabric.

Fishskin is basically shit as far as clothes are concerned. It stinks, falls apart pretty quick, and we didn’t have anything to sew it together anyway. The seaweed wasn’t much of a success either. Then they started experimenting with the sand. No kidding. No sweat with us. The stories were getting old and we’d played charades so much we were signing in our sleep. We could use a new laugh or two.

The first thing to work at all was this cement type stuff they made of sand and the insides of some fish that tended to turn gluey after a while. Maybe a little too gluey, if you know what I mean. They tried a shirt first. Stood some poor schmuck up and started slapping big handfuls of gluey sand on him, kinda smoothing it out once they had enough. Covered him okay, and it actually stayed in place. Little problematic when it came time to sleep. It had hardened into something akin to rock. Took us three and a half days to get it off him. No way were we gonna go for pants made out of that crap.

So they went back to the drawing board, so to speak. Eventually came up with this sort of flexible mixture of sand, seaweed and fish guts. You still had to kind of slap it on and smooth it over, but when it dried, you could pull it off, and later you could pull it on again. Kinda like speedos but grainier.

The women came up with some pretty nice coverings for themselves, drawing little designs and shit on their creations before they dried. The guys were pitiful, me included. The girls said we were on our own in one department, and guys just have this thing about helping some other guy smooth his shorts, if you get my drift. So we didn’t win any fashion parades, but our sand shorts appeased the women and we got to stay pretty much civilized until we got rescued.