We did about a half hour surface interval, got geared up and made the walk back to the water. When we entered the water we noticed a few more jellyfish were there so we submerged and headed toward the rock wall. By the time we got there the jellies were everywhere over our heads. The decision was made to try to make it out of the water by swimming underneath the swarm of jellies toward the beach and hoped we didn’t get stung too much. My students and I got separated a little bit but I managed to push the jellies away enough to stand up and see their bubbles heading to the beach just to the left of me.

I stood up and was about 30 feet from the shore and I was completely surrounded by moon jellies that ranged from 12 inches to 16 inches in diameter. A gentleman on shore who had a paddleboard threw me his paddle and I gently brushed a path so I could walk to shore (no jellyfish were harmed doing this).

Once I got on shore I looked and my students also made it to shore and they were walking towards me. I looked in the water and it looked like every jellyfish in the Gulf decided to come into the jetties that day, it was covered up so thick there was not a space to get back into the water so we called it a day. The interesting thing was that the jellyfish normally don’t really show up in that magnitude until mid-September.

The next day we met at the Dive Locker to sign the paperwork before we headed to the dive boat Narcosis for our last two dives. We loaded the tanks on the boat and the Captain gave his briefing then we headed off to dive the Red Sea wreck. The water was almost flat glass as we anchored the boat. The dive master gave us the water report and said the acorn jellies are near the surface and the moon jellies are around the wreck but the area is big enough that they won’t be an issue for us. He was correct that we didn’t have an issue with any of the moon jellies on the dive.

After the first dive we moved to the bridge spans #12 and the dive master tied off the anchor chain at the top of the spans, it was the same report on the jellies. One of my students and I went in the water last and she had a small issue with clearing her ears but she was able to get them clear and on the way down I could see that a lot of big moon jellies were hanging around the top of the spans right where we were going. I did notice that while we where descending to the top of the spans that the jellies were swimming their way to the bottom, there are really two reasons they do that; one is that there are sea turtles in the area; two there is a low pressure storm front moving in and they don’t want to get shredded on the wreck. While we were swimming around the top of the spans we noticed the light was fading, it was only noon so that meant a storm was coming over head. My student and I started our assent up the anchor rope, when we made our 3 minute safety stop we headed for the stern of the boat and sure enough it was raining, the water was getting rougher so we climbed the ladder and made it safely on the boat.

The main point to this is being very aware of your surroundings especially when you are under water. Watch for the light around you to fade if there is a storm coming and if all the creatures suddenly disappear.

Keep an eye out for sudden changes that might occur.

By the way, none of my students or me suffered any jellyfish stings on either day.