This past weekend was a scorcher, the average temperature was roughly 1 million degrees so I decided to head to the beach on Sunday.  To my surprise, Long Beach was 1 million minus 15 degrees and generally pretty pleasant in comparison to Manhattan.  I couldn't wait to get into the water but when I got down to the water, there were jellyfish all over the beach.  The ones that were washed up were white ones (non-stinging to humans), but I have a somewhat irrational fear of jellyfish so I got freaked out.  My phobia has a solid ground if anyone's interested, it's not totally irrational like Triskaidekaphobia (fear of the #13).  It all started when I was really little I got stung in the eye when I was swimming in the ocean in Malaysia (I now have an eye twitch to remind me not to open my eyes underwater) and as an adult I've been stung by a number of moon jellies (allegedly non-stinging) and have gotten crazy welts.  Some of them are so bad that I've been told I'm allergic so I now always dive with a full wetsuit no matter what the temperature is.

After sending in my tester, the conclusion was that further out there were many red ones too and if you hung out in the water for 10-15 minutes you would definitely be stung. That was a dissapointing find.  A 1 1/2 hour trek out to the beach and I coudln't even go in the water.  No wave surfing, no swimming, just sitting on the beach and having kids toss sand on me.  The interesting thing was that with all those jellyfish out there, nobody seemed to care.  People played in the water as if there was nothign wrong.

The Times ran an article about it.  Here is what one person said about the outbreak of jellyfish: “I thought the water was radioactive or something,” and this from somewhere else “I looked over and in this massive soup of trash and debris was this beautiful pulsating jellyfish,”

Botom line is that jellyfish are my (Green) Kryptonite!  I would wish death upon jellyfish but then what would the turtles have to feed on?  And I love seeing turtles when diving.