It was an obscene ritual we practiced while taking turns screening each other from the road. Fall River in August has a pretty decent evening grab – but to get to it you’d donate a quart of blood and scratch for days.

Gary Warren and I would take turns dropping trousers while frantically smearing our entire body with 100% DEET, then we’d spray each other with the aerosol version and make a dash through the grass for the river.

Generously slathered DEET fixed us and the mosquito problem, ensuring neither of us would reproduce – and leading to its removal from store shelves.

Heat and harsh sunlight was the other issue for us guides – me being the junior ensured I’d get a respite every three or four days, but the primary and secondary guides often endured two and three week stints of 100 degree weather and 14 hour days.

They always wore long sleeve shirts and broad brim hats – which despite the heat burden would assist in keeping the sun off tender flesh -avoiding burns and potential for skin cancer.

Most fabrics offer little protection from the sun and wearing both shirt and tee shirt is not much better.

Researchers are linking coffee (caffeine) with skin protection and have discovered how caffeine blocks mutant cells from becoming cancerous.

“But, Nghiem added, people shouldn’t increase the amount of coffee or tea they drink to prevent skin cancer. “You are talking a lot of cups for a lot of years for a relatively small effect,” he said. “But if you like it, it’s another reason to drink it.”

If the human trials prove convincing, we can all stop apologizing for slopping coffee down our shirt fronts – it’ll be essential gear akin to fly floatant on your dry fly.

It’s mostly “teeth floatant” at the moment, but while you’re running for the underbrush wishing you had zipper-front waders, cursing both bacon and eggs – you can be confident your skin looks radiant.