In August, Diana Nyard attempted to become the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage.  She gave up that attempt after 29 hours of swimming when adverse winds blew her off course.    Late last week she attempted the swim for a second time but was stopped this time by jellyfish, specifically multiple Portuguese Man o’ War  stings.  Two thirds of the way through her second recent attempt at swimming from Cuba to Florida, 62-year-old Diana Nyad was advised to get out of the water by her doctors after being stung repeatedly by jellyfish and Portuguese Man o’ War. Nyad had covered about 92 statute miles over the 40 hour swim, two-thirds of the journey from Cuba to Florida, but her doctors were concerned that toxins were building up in her body from the repeated stings.

Diana Nyad quits Cuba-to-Florida swim

Nyad arrived Sunday evening in Key West, where she spoke with reporters. She walked off her boat “Sunluver” wearing a white bathrobe, her face and lips swollen from the stings, and pulled up a sleeve to show a long cross-shaped welt on her right forearm.

“It’s such a bitter pill,” she said. “I am so capable of that swim. That’s the end though.” 

“Because if it was the weather or Tylenol, but those damned jellyfish,” she added.  

Nyad said that as she swam, she felt paralysis in her back. She recalled swimming through the two stings, which she described as like something out of a sci-fi movie when the tentacles whipped across her.

“I went through two of them and I kept swimming,” said Nyad, who wore long pants and a long-sleeved shirt while swimming. Her clothing covered everything but her hands feet and lips, and she got stung in the lips.

“My lips are like Angelina’s,” she quipped.