Stings and things!

Just wanted to let you all know that my Chicken curry on Tuesday night was a magnificent success :-)

I woke up yesterday morning looking like I had caught some horrible disease!! My right arm was covered in red welts from the jellyfish (probably bluebottle) sting I got on Tuesday afternoon. It was really quite painful and I felt pretty grotty with it. I had other smaller patches of stings on my left arm and on my legs too – not great! So I spent the day popping antihistamines like they were going out of fashion!

I went along to another talk last night on Whale Sharks. And after that, back at the house, we had a party and BBQ as it was Emily’s birthday! One of the dive guides from the dive centre saw my arm and told me I should run it under hot water (as hot as I could stand) to neutralize the jellyfish venom and then scrape the area with something hard as the jellyfish stings are still under the skin. I decided to try it and it worked a treat!! Almost immediately I felt better and it was lots less itchy! I had an earlyish night and let the youngsters get on with the partying as I had an early start in the morning ;-)

This morning, I was on a two dive trip. I was diving with Adriana and we did Manta Reef again for the first dive. Adriana was testing me on my fish ID and I managed to get most of them right :-) We then did some fish counts and then mooched about on the reef with the other divers. We saw a Bow-Mouthed Guitar Shark which is a very weird looking fish – it had lumps and bumps on its head and almost looks like it’s from the dinosaur peroid! We also saw a couple of moray eels and at the end of the dive, we saw 2 Mantas!

We saw a couple of whale sharks on the way to the next dive site but they disappeared before we could snorkel with them :-( Unfortunately, I got very narced by finning into the current at 30m the start of the second dive so I surfaced with one of the dive guides. It seems that there are a few sites that require finning against the current so I’ll have to make sure I pick the right ones for my last few dives – I wasn’t made for finning into current :-(

So I’m having a chilled out afternoon and tomorrow we have more research dives and an Ocean Safari on the agenda.