A wetsuit not required - or so I thought

Diving in 28C water, is a wetsuit really required? If we talk about exposure protection, now there is a different requirement. I was diving in the tropics in really warm water, my 75 minute dive wasn't going to see me get cold, but what about skin protection? To my detriment, I never took that into account.

I was diving around a pier with a little bit of current around, not a great deal but enough to make you think about it. If you are not thinking about what you are doing in regards to positioning, it is pretty easy to be washed up against the pier uprights damaging the growth or maybe getting stung.

As we ascended in the shallows to off-gas on our safety stop, I nearly swam into a stinger, that would have earned me a nice mark on my face. As I broke the surface, it was almost impossible to move through the water without contacting the stingers in the water - they were everywhere. The boat was some distance away and I needed to swim backwards allowing my cylinder and BCD to deflect most of the tentacles away. 

As I only had a set of speedos on, I had plenty of flesh exposed and I was copping stings pretty much all over my body. As I approached the boat as he cruised in, the boat boy was telling me to take my fins off before trying to climb up the ladder. No chance, I dug my heels into the ladder rung to remove the bulk of my body from the water and out of the reach of those electric tentacles.

My usual procedure on these really small boats is to throw my equipment in the water and get in it on the surface for deep water or let it sink to the bottom for shallower water and put it on there. Normally getting out of my equipment underwater on the way to the surface so I can hand it directly to the boat crew is my normal procedure - not today. 

I tried to climb out of the water like it was toxic, for all intent purposes it was for me, I wanted no more exposed skin being touched by these box jellyfish. These stings are not going to cause respiratory shock to throw me into a coma like some box jellyfish are able to - still, these stingers really made me jump so lesson learnt. I might not need a wetsuit to keep warm - the exposure protection it provides is the real key for warm water diving.