Turtle release

Living by the ocean brings on a whole new world of learning and awareness of Marine life. Here in Sayulita, the neighboring town of San Pancho and all around the world groups of volunteers come together to try to bring the five different species of Sea Turtles back to being populous in our oceans. All five of the species are almost extinct.

Alex, Trace and myself had the opportunity to visit a nursery that literally saves the Sea Turtles from extinction. We learned all about the life of a turtle starting with the egg.
The group in San Poncho consists of about 8 people from all over the world who live in sort of a compound together and take care of the nursery. These people are volunteers and this is a non profit outfit.

Here is a brief history of Turtles
So... as I said, it all starts with the egg. The turtles come up onto the beach and lay their eggs. This group of volunteers wait on the beach, sometimes in nasty weather conditions and all night long to rescue the eggs from poachers. They take them back to the nursery pack them into coolers with sand, heat the nursery and log all of the important information so they know when the eggs will hatch. On hatching day the coolers are taken out opened and the waiting begins. When the turtles hatch and make their way up through the sand they come by twos, hugging each other, each one using a flipper, like they are one to come to the top.

They are then placed in a basket while they come to life. They need the air to help them come alive, it takes about an hour and then they gradually become very active little creatures. The waiting begins for the release. You want them to be released very soon after they hatch, within hours, but you really need to wait until sunset or else birds will see them and eat them. You want them released soon after hatching because for the first five days of a turtles life they do nothing but swim, no eating or sleeping. So you do not want them to waste their energy while waiting to be released. It is estimated that the baby turtles will swim about 14 miles a day in the first five days of life. When you release the turtles you put them on the beach a little ways from the water. This is done on purpose because turtles always come back to the exact same beach that they first entered the water to lay their own eggs.

So they have to walk from the beach into the water to lay their scent or whatever it is they put out there to know where to come back to. They could literally swim to Hawaii to hang with some friends but when it is time to lay their eggs they will come right back to the beach in San Poncho where we released them to lay their eggs.

Okay, here comes the sad part...we released about 1000 turtles and after 15 years when a mature female turtle is ready to lay eggs, approximately 2 of those 1000 turtles will have lived long enough to come back to lay their eggs. But in the 21 years that this group has been in San Poncho the number of eggs has grown ten fold which means that more turtles are surviving and coming back to lay their eggs.

So that is the history in brief of the Sea Turtle. I have had the opportunity to swim with turtles in Maui. Actually I was just snorkeling and there they were, When surfing in Chacala, here in Mexico there was a turtle there with us enjoying the waves as well and I actually saw one today while paddle boarding in Sayulita. Turtles are a very peaceful, slow, large creatures. I was so glad that I could teach my children about life and the importance of protecting ocean species and let them participate in this release of life.

They also found the dune buggy ride on the beach under the full moon to be pretty cool as well.