A Glimpse in Eternity...cont'd

THE BOX JELLYFISH
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
-Psalm 139:16 (NIV)

Back in Mauritius again for a few weeks, I rented a house, reconnected with my Creole friends, and spent my time surfing and night diving.

One evening a week before I was due to leave for New Zealand, a diving friend came to my house and asked me to come out night diving with him.
I walked out onto my verandah and saw a huge electrical storm raging out at sea. The white electric lightening flashes were illuminating the black sky. I turned to my friend Simon and asked, “Are you sure - have you seen the storm?” I was afraid the storm would bring too much surf up onto the reef and become dangerous.

But Simon replied “It’ll be okay, we’ll go about five miles down the coast to a very beautiful part of the reef to dive tonight. You’ll be amazed how beautiful it is.”

In the end he talked me into it. It was about 11 o’clock at night. I got all my gear, jumped in the boat and off we all went - Simon, another local diver, a boat boy, and myself.

We rowed down the coast to the spot that Simon had talked about. We were about half a mile off the actual island. The boat was sitting in the inner lagoon, and we were going to dive on the outer part of the reef where it drops away steeply into the ocean. It really was as beautiful as Simon had said it would be.


We dived in.
I went up the reef and my two friends went down the reef.
Normally we stick together but for some reason we got separated.

I was looking for crayfish when my flashlight beam picked out a strange sea creature in the dark water.
It looked like a squid........ Curious, I swam closer to it and actually reached out my hand and grabbed it.

I had my diving gloves on and it squeezed through my fingers like a jellyfish. As it floated away I watched it, intrigued, as it was a very odd looking jellyfish. It had what appeared to be a squid’s bell-shaped head, but its back was box shaped and it had very unusual, transparent, finger like tentacles stretching way out behind it.
I’d never seen that type of jellyfish before, but I turned away from it and continued with my crayfish search.

I turned my flashlight back onto the reef and continued searching for my prey.

Suddenly something smashed into my forearm like a thousand volts of electricity.

I swung around to see what it was. I had a short arm wetsuit on, so the only part of my body that wasn’t covered by a wetsuit was my forearms.

Something had brushed past me and stung me with an incredible shock.

It was like standing on wet concrete, bare foot, and resting your hand right up against the electrical mains. I recoiled from it in fright, and searched frantically with my flashlight to find out what it was, or where it was, but I couldn’t see what had hit me.

To be cont'd
Bless you Yaddy