Living water

Spray from the beach showers painted dancing rainbows around us. I pointed out to a fellow swimmer, Iván, the recent scars on my leg. ‘Oof! Mal,’ bad, he commented sympathetically. ‘They hurt.’

They do indeed, they hurt like little red-hot needles when it first happens. They’re almost worth suffering, though, for the satisfying gasps of horror when you show them to people. My exhibit consisted of two finger-length rows of bright red spots and another cluster of them covering an area the size of a hen’s egg, like the aftermath of a picnic by a herd of fleas.

‘I got stung as well,’ Iván commented, and showed me the scars on his left arm. The worst thing about having any kind of wound is that someone’s always got a better one. The rows of spots on Iván’s arm were bigger, brighter, more numerous and a sinister shade of purple.

We’d both been stung a couple of days before, when the wind changed from the benign alisios which blow from the north to the more treacherous southerlies, which can bring all kinds of trouble such as rain in winter or mists of African dust in summer and, on the beaches, heavier swells and bigger waves that roll in from the south.

And with those waves come, just occasionally, jellyfish. This is a very rare event - in many years we get none at all - but when they do float in it’s wise to climb out of the water, dry off and stay away until they’ve gone.

I didn’t spot the one that got me until too late. It happened just after I’d walked waist-deep into the sea and launched into my warm-up overarm stroke, when I felt something wrap itself around my leg. This could mean an encounter with a plastic bag which is disconcerting, but plastic bags don’t sting.

James Bond would have calmly diagnosed the problem, thrown a mini-grenade and swum away powerfully, leaving behind him a muffled whoomp! and a fountain of jelly and tentacles. I didn’t do that. I panicked, yelled, beat the water with both hands, struggled to my feet again and lurched backwards towards the beach.

As I retreated I glimpsed my attacker just beneath the surface - a translucent blob about the size of a ring doughnut, dull yellow-brown in colour with darker spots somewhere inside. It was pulsating gently like a ballet-dancing parachute.

This was an aguaviva, literally ‘living water’. A delightful name for a thoroughly nasty animal. It trails thin tendrils as it glides through the water, each tendril covered in little stingers. The shock of being stung is worse than the pain itself, which is not much greater than the burn you get from brushing against a nettle and it doesn’t last for long.

Other types of jellyfish can do more damage. When I announced proudly in Arturo’s café that I’d been stung by an aguaviva someone capped my story by saying two Portuguese men o’ war had been seen floating around in the marina. They’d heard this from a friend who had heard it from a yacht owner. La fragata portuguesa! Two of them! If you get stung by a portuguesa, well now, that’s really something you’d know all about… Yeah, yeah, okay. I’d only been stung by an aguaviva. Must try harder next time.

Too late now though, the southerly winds had died down to be replaced by the northerly alisios and all the jellyfish had drifted away, leaving the water as calm and clear as usual. For a day or two I swam in short bursts, raising my head regularly like a performing seal looking for buns, but now we’re all back to normal. Still got the scars, though, they linger for a long time. I took a photograph of them at their vivid best but nobody’s very interested.

NOTES

for the serious student

In case you’re worried, jellyfish are not a big problem in La Gomera. In thirty years of swimming off the beach in San Sebastián this was my first personal encounter.

However, they’re out there in the broad ocean, as they are worldwide. The aguaviva is one of the most common types in these waters. Its English name is the mauve stinger, which is less poetic but perhaps more helpful, and they come in a choice of colours from mauve through pink to a muddy brown like the one that stung me.

The other two common varieties float on the surface of the water rather than hiding sneakily below. One is called the velella, which derives from vela, sail, because it has a little triangular sail like an offcut from a sheet of celluloid. In English it’s a by-the-wind-sailor, a beautiful name for a blob of jelly.

Then there’s the fragata portuguesa, the Portuguese man o’ war, a suitably bellicose name for a creature with a nastier sting. It has a taller, inflated sail which looks vaguely obscene, like something invented for a sci-fi film about invading aliens. Beneath this is a complex body the size of a dinner plate, broadly purple in its overall colour scheme, and supporting a trail of tentacles that can stretch ten metres or more. They’re not really proper jellyfish at all if we’re being pedantic, they’re a clever assembly of several different organisms that cooperate for mutual benefit. Theirs, not ours.