There is no delicate way to describe the appearance of an algal bloom currently spewing itself around the Tamaterau foreshore on Whangārei Harbour.
It looks like someone dredged up the contents of a well used long-drop dunny and spread it over every surface on the shallow beachfront.
It's all a natural process of algae rhythms but is not poisonous. Nor is that something most beachgoers would want to test.
''Yep, it smells! Yep, It's ugly. Yep, you wouldn't want to swim in it, but nope, it's not sewage,'' a Whangārei District Council social media post said.
The stinking mess is part of the march of time and tide — or, less poetically, the time being a warm spring and the tide being very low at the hottest time of the day.
''The days are starting to heat up and the greeblies known as algae are having a party. It's what you might expect when you have all-day heat on seafood,'' said media spokeswoman Ann Midson.
''It's part of the natural foreshore process, and the time of the tide during the day, the prevailing winds, nutrients in the water and many other conditions all have an effect.
''The best thing to do is to swim somewhere else if it offends you, or take along a bucket and gather up some of this lovely nutritious stuff for your garden,'' Midson said.
The matter is expected to dry into a soft crust and be dispersed by tides. A WDC wastewater team would keep an eye on the blooming mess at Tamaterau, and the Northland Regional Council (NRC) was not concerned about the matter at this stage.
Each year the NRC receives reports from the public of poor water quality, a lot of them due to naturally occurring algal and plankton phenomena. Most seaweed is algae.
Blooms, or a sudden increase in the population of microscopic algae in fresh or sea water, are often identified by the high density pigmented cells colouring the water. They can make jelly-like clusters or thick mats just beneath the surface.
Not all blooms lead to a toxic reaction in shellfish which caused shellfish in the Bay of Islands to be out of bounds much of this year.