Tag Archives: jellyfish

Ketchup

A [lightly edited] excerpt from an email I sent yesterday at 2:15 p.m.:

Last night, I experienced the acute pain of a bluebottle sting. Ummm, my entire leg felt like it was on fire and swelling up, and the pain spread to my groin! How insane is that? Thinking that perhaps I was stung by an irukandji, or was having an allergic reaction to a regular, ol’ hombre de guerra (man o’ war), I called B____ in a panic.

“Is that normal?” I asked.

“Yeah, that sounds… pretty normal, yeah.”

He told me his mum’s remedy, “dating from approximately 1945,” was to apply vinegar, but that he preferred ice. I settled for a bag of frozen veggies. It did decrease the swelling. And made for a funny Instagram. (Well, I think it’s funny.)

Actually, it occurred to me that the laziest (yet perhaps most effective) way of bringing you up to speed is via photographs. So, I am storrowing an idea from the brilliant fellows over at Surfing mag: Here’s some of what I’ve been neglecting to tell you about in a handy gallery of recent Instagram photos:

If, inexplicably, you’re keen for more of my mundane misadventures and mediocre photography, find me: @casebut.

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The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

On Friday morning, I received two wake-up texts from my human buoys. (Thanks, guys.) Unfortunately, the earlier one didn’t wake me up. The one that did said, “2 foot grab ur board.” By the time I got my wits about me, low tide was hours gone, but it was still glassy, not closing out, and the water was w.a.r.m. So warm, actually, that it was flooded with jellies.

“The stinging kind? Or the disc ones?” my friend asked me later.

“The disc ones,” I said, ” and a lot of those ones that look kind of like this.” (I held up one of the beaters from an electric mixer.)

“Nettles?”

“I don’t know, they weren’t stinging me. But they were everywhere.”

It was like surfing in a murky, green Jell-O bath. It was awesome. It was shark week. Continue reading

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