Blue Bottle Jellies

Known to many people as the Portuguese Man of War, the Blue Bottle Jellyfish is not a creature to be messed around with.  We found this out the hard way yesterday afternoon on Narrabeen beach located just north of Sydney.
After spending a few wonderful hours body surfing on the prime waves Leighton discovered the presence of these small blue tentacled creatures by swimming directly into one.  the tentacles tangled in his necklace and arm causing him to exclaim in shock while franticaly trying to brush them off. At the same instant I pulled my arm from the water to discover my right ring finger draped with a tentacal as well.  We quickly vacated the ocean in order to avoid more encounters, but still managed to get at least one more tangled around each of our lower halves.  As we stood on the beach and looked around we noticed that while the sand had been clean and brown not two hours ago it was now littered with thousands of blue jellyfish up and down the cove as far as we could see.

The effects of encountering these slimy little guys are not instantly apparent as they start out as only a small tingle in the area of contact, but as you stand there that tingle begins to intensify and multiply until in the end it feels like you are being pricked with thousands of tiny needles all over the area you were touched.  I would liken it most to the feeling you get after brushing up against Poison Ivy, but slightly more intense.

For me this pain was located mostly on my left leg and right ring finger and as such was bearable with a little bit of teeth grinding and some stomping in the sand. Leighton on the other hand had a much worse reaction to the blue devils.  The particular one that got on Leighton's necklace ended up leaving behind a very nasty raised welt on his chest that oozed  liquid even 12 hours later, and while they did no lasting damage he did need to get some ice from the passing surf rescue patrol in order to reduce the welt size.  The only good we could find from the jellyfish on the beach was the satisfying pop they made when you stepped on their bubble head section.  It was a little funny to listen to the surf patrol guys drive off in their four wheeler to the sound of a thousand pop-its, but on the whole the jellyfish were really just aggravating buggers because they made us cut our beach adventure short.  And on another note these Blue Bottles must have all be lady jellies because they attacked Leighton and I to no end but left our friend Alina, who is a girl and was swimming not 10 feet away from us, alone completely.