El Andalous - Jellyfish Season

Jellyfish Season

Fish seem to be seasonal to a certain extent; there seem to be times when I see turtles, crabs, rays and times when I don’t. But there’s one season, and it must be now, that the jellyfish arrive en masse.

Fortunately, the ones that hang around Sahl Hasheesh don’t sting. There are two distinct types, one is round, smooth and blue-colored and the other is white/transparent and oblong-shaped with a bit of raised ribbing.

I can remember previous years where you’d see them washing up on the beach by the dozens and probably hundreds over the week. Apparently someone initially thought that they were discarded silicon boob inserts!

However, this is the first year I can remember where they’ve actually hindered my swimming. The water is currently really warm for February (in my opinion) after a bit of a heat wave last week when I was ill. Hilda said the sea was 23 degrees a couple of weeks ago and I'd say it's maybe 24 degrees now (she thinks it's colder now, but she hasn't actually gone in). At night, my bedroom temperature rose from 23 to 25 degrees at night, so at least in my little corner it's got warmer. I’m not splashing myself before I get in at the moment and I can snorkel about afterwards without thinking that I need to get out of the water soon if I I’m not to be too cold on exiting. So, maybe the change in temperature's something to do with the sudden onslaught of jellyfish.

Anyway, I went swimming on Thursday and my hands kept on thrusting into a jellyfish, or when I’d push back in my stroke, I’d feel my hand brushing a jellyfish aside, or one would brush against my cheek, or maybe my arm. Sometimes, my fingers thrust inside the jellyfish as I reached forwards and that was the worst. I couldn't stop myself from screeching through the sheer shock of it.

There were hundreds of them all around me. It was impossible to swim without touching them and I swear that they tried to approach me. At least if you have a shoal of fish, the fish are amazingly good at parting and letting you through. The jellyfish, they just seem to aim straight for my face and it almost seems deliberate. Surely not!

If you touch them on the surface, they feel surprisingly jelly-like and quite solid (just like the frozen jelly you eat if you touched it, but not cold). Although it doesn’t hurt, it’s not exactly conducive to swimming (you can’t swim through jelly after all, and if you touch it, you are immediately no longer pulling through the water). It’s a shock and it’s frustrating.

If your fingers somehow dig into its middle (which is what I’m assuming happens when I’m not getting that solid jelly sensation but – I don’t know – a wetter sensation, maybe?), it feels more like soap. If I rub my fingers together afterwards, they feel kind of slippery (but somehow not slimy in the way that soap isn’t slimy). However, in my head, I’ve got something’s innards round my fingers, so conceptually the thought is pretty disgusting and that’s what makes me squeal as much as anything. 

The fish, particularly the butterflyfish, seem to enjoy this season and when I go snorkeling I can see them in crowds diving at a jellyfish and taking bites at them. It's a hive of activity beneath the surface.

Incidentally, even though I was squealing quite loudly as I swam, absolutely nobody paid any attention to me. I’m not sure if this is a good thing (at least I didn’t have the embarrassment of someone trying to save me) or a bad thing (what if I had been in danger?), but maybe they could tell my squeals were just squeals of disgust.

At times, I’d look in the water and there would be hundreds of them all around me – there was no avoiding them and I just had to continue to swim (and continue to bump into them) and this was for a fairly large stretch of my swim. There was no other way back.

I did my full swim, but didn’t do my drills afterwards because I couldn’t face having to go through them again. The jellyfish haven’t started to beach yet, but I guess that will come soon enough. I’m hoping they will move on elsewhere, otherwise my swimming routine may get rather difficult.