Snorkeling Unpleasantries.....

I had never been snorkeling before coming to Dominica, but since our arrival on the island, I feel like I've been doing a decent job at making up for lost time. All of my snorkeling experiences previous to this semester were amazing and quite pleasant. We had one incident when we were snorkeling with some of our friends and all of us started to get stung, so we turned around and decided to get out of the water. I should do more research, but I was told it could have been "sea berries" (???) or small jellyfish. Either way, the sting quickly went away and it was no big deal. Well, snorkeling this week might be just enough to slow my snorkeling pace down..... and quite a bit! On Monday, Whitney and I decided to go and snorkel one more time before she left. We saw a water snake and 2 eels, and they didn't look friendly. The thing with snorkeling is, if the water is not super clear, it's often times hard to see what's coming up next, which is what happened with the eels. We looked down, and 4 feet below us was an eel. (happened 2x) I was a little bit jittery as we swam off, but Whitney didn't seemed bothered. I decided to shake it off and not let it bother me. Well, today's experience pushed me over the top for a little while. There is a beach not to far from the beach we normally swim and snorkel at called Purple Turtle Beach. Rumor has it that you can snorkel for sand dollars there and most people walk away with between 10-15 sand dollars. Keith had the afternoon off so we decided to take a quick trip and see if we couldn't find ourselves some sand dollars. Off we went and with in the first couple of minutes Keith and I both found one. Both excited, we swam on to find more. We found a few more but broke them while trying to retrieve them. Determined to walk away with AT LEAST 15 sand dollars, I kept swimming to find more. Keith was having problems with his mask fogging up and stopped to fix the problem. I went ahead, thinking I'd scope out the place and see if I could find a jack-pot of sand dollars. Well, sadly enough, as I swam ahead, I found a jackpot of something else. JELLY FISH! I have heard of small jelly fish (i think they are called thimble jellyfish) that sting you a little bit while in the water and I think that's what stung us when we were with our friends. These jelly fish, however, were bigger and quite visible! I was swimming along, looking at the bottom for sand dollars and when I looked up, I was already within touching distance of 3 jellyfish (about the size of a large apple or orange). I slowly tried to back up, and took off frantically back towards Keith. A little one must have stung me on the front of my chest, right along my swimming suit line, because although it hurt, it wasn't as bad as what came later. After finally spitting out what I was so freaked out about to Keith, he wanted to go and have a look. I stayed put as he went to check it out, but he couldn't see anything. I slowly swam over to him and pointed one out to which he calmly replied "Yep, looks like a jellyfish" we decided to turn back, as we had swam quite a distance from where we had left our belongings. After a minute or two of swimming, I felt one sting my leg, but it hurt a bit worse than any that I had received before. I kicked my leg up towards my butt and grabbed my leg when the tragedy happened. I must have kicked the jellyfish onto my butt, because not even a second after I kicked, my butt went numb and then started to sting like nothing it had felt before. Right in the middle, getting mostly one cheek, but part of the other. I yelped a little inside my snorkel mask, and swam like crazy, while holding my rear, over to Keith. I pulled him up out of the water and told him what had happened. My poor husband is constantly holding back laughter due to the things that I do and at that moment, I thought he was going to burst. He did feel bad for me though, and started to carry me back to the shore while I kept every muscle from my knees to my waist flexed and clenched while letting out whimpers. With Keith carrying me, we weren't moving very fast and I just wanted out of the water. I volunteered to swim for a little bit, but found it hurt a decent amount if things weren't "clenched". I then tried to swim and just use my arms and from my knees down to kick with, while keeping everything above my knees flexed. As you can guess, that didn't worked great either and I looked more idiotic than anything. Keith ended up carrying me for a little while longer and then I darted for shore and called a taxi to go home. Did we end up with 15 sand dollars? No. But, I think that 3 sand dollars and a jellyfish to the butt might be able to compete! :)