Jellyfish

Otherwise known as 'the day my aunt walked on water'!

If you're from Western Australia and you've spent any real time at a beach along the South West coast then you would be familiar with the annual plague of STINGERS!! These nasty little seaside menaces are a type of Box Jellyfish. They may be tiny but they pack a real punch. Nowhere near as bad as the Irukandji jellyfish that plague the northern waters-those little nightmares will kill you. The Box Jellyfish we get here just have a really painful sting in long red welts. The thing is the jellyfish are completely transparent, a square cube shape with the stingers appearing like black threads out the four back corners. It takes calm water and a practised eye to spot the jellyfish swarms in the shallows.

When I was a child I had an aunt who lived on Geographe Bay. We were on a farm about an hour inland from her but used to spend many school holidays visiting her since she was my mum's favourite aunt and mum loved the beach.

Aunt was a very big lady, very "well proportioned" if you know what I mean. Sadly its the family curse since a large proportion of the women in my family are built this way...not as big but  certainly "large boned".

Aunt used to love to tell the time she had a rather...personal...encounter with Box Jellyfish. She had headed out for her daily swim, the beach was only one street away from her unit. Once on the sand she kicked off her shoes and peeled off her wrap then started wading out into the water. The waters in some areas of the bay are quite shallow so you can be quite a way out till the water is waist deep, the point most adults like to get too before they dive in and start swimming. Once Aunt was out far enough so that the water was up to her waist she dived in....and disaster struck.

Unwittingly Aunt had dived straight into a large swarm on these jellyfish and the low front of her one-piece bathers had acted like a mini trawl-net, scooping dozens of jellyfish straight down her cleavage!!

Aunt reckoned she performed a miracle that day, she walked on water she was gong that fast in her haste to get back to the beach and get those nasty, stinging, slippery little invaders out of her bathing costume.
She was also madly struggling to wriggle out of the top half of her bathers and said later that she didn't really care who was there to witness her.