Setting a 'skinny dipping' record

CLEVELAND – A crowd of more than 100 turned out in White County Saturday to help a nationwide effort to establish a Guinness World Record for a mass North American skinny-dip.

Serendipity Park is an American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR) club site near Cleveland.

“All the AANR clubs are getting together and exactly at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time we’re going to have the largest skinny dipping nation wide,” park spokesman Chuck Ray said. “We’ve been planning this for several months now. Nobody’s ever done this before.”

In order to qualify for the Guinness record, the skinny dippers had to be exactly that, completely nude when counted, but there was a concession for bashful first-timers: participants not used to skinny-dipping in public were allowed to wear swimsuits into the water but had to remove the swimsuit once in the water and hold it overhead to signal the witnesses.

Around 150 people crowded the Serendipity pool to help set the record. Two other northeast Georgia nudist resorts - Bell Acres in Banks County and Paradise Valley in Dawson County - also participated in the mass skinny-dip.

Ray said while it’s the first time to attempt an American world record, skinny dipping is as old as Mankind.

“It goes way back,” Ray added. “If you look at the history books, it probably goes back to ancient Chinese times, and there were the Roman bath houses.”

After all, Ray said, people were nude before they had clothes.

AANR, which sponsored the the mass skinny-dip, was still tabulating the results of the nationwide event Monday morning which included about 250 nudist resorts and beaches across the country.