Jelly with breakfast

       I've been up in the Seattle area over the last few days, and was staying at a great little rental cottage right smack on the water.  On Tuesday, I'd awakened early. The tide was in, which meant that the water was all the way up to the pilings on which the cottage's foundation rested.  I'd made my morning coffee and was standing at a window in the kitchen, looking straight down at the water.  And something sort of pale and fuzzy caught my eye.  I looked closer.  It was whitish and sort of translucent.  Seaweed? A plastic bag under the water? 

A jellyfish!

I'd never seen a jellyfish outside of an aquarium.  I watched some more, noticing that it had started to drizzle a bit and drops were hitting the still surface of the water.

Wait....those weren't drops. It wasn't raining.  That was the water surface moving because there were more jellyfish.

And more. And more.

I realized that there were thousands of them, as far as I could see, just drifting, pulsing slowly as they do.  A jellyfish ballet right outside my window.  It was mesmerizing.

 I ran to wake up Miss C, who grudgingly got out of bed to come see and then was instantly awed and delighted to see the water water ballet we had performing right outside our window.  She consulted the Google and learned that they were Moon Jellies, quite common in the Puget Sound and distinctive for the four-leaf-clover looking structures which, it turns out, are gonads.  The male jellies' are white, the females are a pinkish tone. 

And then Miss C spotted this fellow, off a ways under the surface of the water so it was hard to see him clearly:

We think it was a Lion's Mane jellyfish. 

Good thing we weren't going swimming.  But what a magical sight!