Archive for the 'The Competition' Category
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Irukandji Jellyfish Strikes the Island Caretaker…
It’s been a while since I touched base regarding the 2009 Island Caretaker, Ben Southall. Ben enjoyed a whirlwind adventure as the Hamilton Island Caretaker in Queensland, Australia. If you were like me, you probably had a difficult time keeping up with Ben’s fun-filled vacation. While Ben enjoyed exploring the Great Barrier Reef, the rest of us were hunkering down with our real world lives (and jobs). Anyway, after more than six months of fame, fortune and sunny adventures, Ben’s journey was coming to a close. I had always wondered whether or not the Queensland Tourism Committee had strict blogging guidelines regarding any negative tourism topics that might have come up, such as venemous snakes, great white shark attacks or deadly jellyfish. With only a few final days left in his contract, Ben went out for a jet skiing adventure and in fact was stung on the arm by a deadly Irukandji Jellyfish.
I emailed a link to a few friends back last March on a Discovery Channel show on the Irukandji jellyfish. The people in the video were stung by Iracongi and were out of commission for several days and were lucky to be alive. If hypothetically, I had ended up with this job, I would never have forgiven myself if anyone in my family was stung by this type of Jellyfish. Ben was apparently stung after climbing back onto a Jet Ski and indicated he thought it felt like a bee sting. After feeling the classic symptoms of a tightening chest, high blood pressure and uncontrollable pain, he received emergency on-site treatment including a shot. As of late, it seems he slept off the sting and seems to have recovered and continues to appear “too happy”. These type of stings can be very dangerous. In the shooting of the movie, Fools Gold with Matthew Mcconaughey and Kate Hudson, the film crew stopped filming at one point due to the Iracongi jellyfish. In fact there were one or two people killed near Hamilton Island by the deadly Irukandji jellyfish in the past few years. Anyway, while I’m sure there were lots of memorable events in Australia that I would have enjoyed to be a part of, this is one event I’m glad I missed.
