Jellyfish

By: Riley Nyberg

Much of my time in Florida was quite enjoyable, something that surprised me, if I’m being honest. Who knew that spending four days learning about sea grass, fish anatomy, and the phylum of snot-bubble-blowing worms could be fun? In any case, while most of my time at Marine Lab was at the very least interesting, one point of that trip sticks out in my mind as being one of the worst 20 minutes of my life. The reason? I’ll give you one word: jellyfish.

To most people, jellyfish are something of a minor nuisance, much like a wasp or mosquito (keep in mind, I’m not talking about the jellyfish that will really mess you up, like a Man O’ War, but just your basic, run of the mill jellyfish). For me, however, it’s different. When I’m in the water, those things are out for blood.

Being at Marine Lab was my first experience with jellies, outside of being on the other side of a thick glass wall in an aquarium. Sure, I was a bit nervous looking off the rocking boat and down into the water teeming with floating, pulsating blobs of doom, but I had no idea the fate that was about to be mine. Ignoring the sense of foreboding building in my gut, I pulled on my fins and hesitantly took the plunge into the cold - sorry, refrigerated - water of the open ocean.

While this was not my first time snorkeling (that had been the day before, when I realized my brain was really bad at breathing underwater), it was my first time when waves were a factor, and I wasn’t very confident in my abilities even without that added difficulty. As I made my way over to the rope we were all supposed to hold on to so we would stay as a group, I began to realize just how many jellyfish there were in the surrounding water. Honestly, it was kind of insane. Anywhere you looked you were guaranteed to see at least three or four of them slowly pulsating. I was a little bit intimidated, but I figured it would probably be fine. Oh, how wrong I was.

When the second the group and I started swimming out towards the reef we were going to explore, things started to escalate rather quickly. Suddenly, jellyfish that had once seemed too distant to pose an immediate threat now appeared much, much closer. They pressed in on me like walls, slowly floating closer and closer. My breaths came fast and shallow as I started seeing more and more around me. I jumped at the slightest brush from my snorkel vest’s long buckle tail against my legs. Out in the open ocean, I – who have been finding and tucking myself into the smallest, darkest places my whole life – began to feel claustrophobic.

As I struggled against the waves with the rest of the group, I began to feel an increasingly urgent feeling of foreboding. Anywhere I turned, there would be a jellyfish floating as close as mere inches from my face. I began to enter a semi-panicked state, constantly whirling around in every direction at once, trying to keep eyes on all the jellyfish surrounding me. My breaths were already coming in short gasps after maybe a minute in the water, though everyone else seemed to be doing relatively fine. However, it wasn’t until I spotted a jelly floating underneath Andrew that things started to get bad.

Now quick disclaimer - I’m not entirely sure what exactly happened in the next minute or so, but from what I’ve been able to piece together, I’m fairly certain it went something like this.

As I pulled my head out of the water to warn Andrew of the danger beneath him, my body went from being something like a log floating on top of the waves to that of someone treading water. As this happened, a wave caught me and pushed me backwards, directly into a group of those accursed jellies. Even the thought of thoughts flew out of my mind immediately, replaced by one simple, all consuming thing: pain. Being stung by those jellyfish was like nothing I had ever experienced before. While it wasn’t the worst pain I have felt (that title goes to the time last summer when I sunburned my shoulders so badly they bubbled, and I couldn’t wear a shirt or sleep for three days), it was definitely up there. Why I say they were unlike anything I’d experienced before is because of how they hurt. It was quite a unique pain, akin to what I imagine it would feel like to have your skin dehydrated and then stretched over an open flame. And while I probably could have dealt with the pain and kept swimming if it was just, say, my arm, it was everywhere, most likely because I ran directly into the jellies.

As you can probably imagine, I went into complete panic mode, something that probably got me stung at least a couple more times. Really, why is it that our brains' responses to things almost always makes it worse? Anyway, I somehow managed to communicate to Smiley (one of our instructors from Marine Lab) that I had been stung, and that I was headed back to the boat. I really don't remember getting back onto the boat, but I do remember sitting on it, trying (and failing) not to curse as pain shot across my body. The first fifteen minutes after I got out of the water were positively awful, but it honestly wasn’t that bad after the initial pain. In fact, after about twenty minutes, pretty much all that was left were the marks, and even those faded fairly quickly. I do feel kinda bad for Ava, though, because there is no way my ranting about the pain was doing anything to help her seasickness.

Eventually, those of us on the boat were joined by the majority of the group, and I got to show off my sting marks (I had the most by a fair margin). We headed back to the mainland, and I was pretty much back at 100 percent by the time we got off the boat, aside from some minor trauma and the addition of a likely life-long fear of jellyfish. In the end, this whole thing didn’t take away from my overall experience, which I’m very grateful for. I really just wish I’d trusted my gut when it told me not to get into the water. But hey, like I always say:

At the end of the day,

            It’s night.

The End