Turtle Trip, Day 1 (Saturday): Getting there

After multiple flight delays, we finally arrived in Savannah Georgia at about 2:00am. There are three things that really stuck out to me to make it really obvious we weren’t at home: guns, palm trees, and Jesus. The first was a giant sign for a gun convention at this big civic center thing. The second were everywhere you drove, mixed in with otherwise normal looking trees which were often covered in Spanish moss. It makes the whole place seem kind of eerie, but beautiful. 

A lot of the stores and things are the same as back home, but there are some brand name differences. The final one was blaring from a tv in the hotel lobby when we went to check in. I suppose at that late an hour, the person working the desk can watch whatever they want and there probably isn’t much else on anyway. A fourth thing that was different was that everything was damp, even indoors. We were kind of hungry when we got to our hotel, but nothing was open around us, so we just crashed and waited until the hotel breakfast. The food was actually pretty good. They had a self serve waffle maker and a little machine that made pancakes on a conveyor belt. After we ate, we went back to bed until it was time to check out. 

We got an Uber to take us to the marina, which was about an hour away. The driver was nice, but the car smelled like pot that was covered up with incense and I had a headache by the time we got there. We didn’t have any plans to stop for lunch so we ordered from door dash and there were only 3 places that would deliver to the marina, and the one we chose wound up being on another island with a bridge that had no direct route to us, so it took longer. It was really good chicken parm though. The boat to our island was late for a variety of reasons, including a thunderstorm and a sailboat race. We did see a hummingbird while we waited, though. The ride to the island was fairly uneventful and very scenic.

Upon arrival at the island, we loaded our gear into ATVs, or mules, as they call them here, and drove to the cabin we’re staying at. 

We put the sheets we brought onto the twin bunk beds in the communal cabin everyone shares and napped until supper time. We had BLTs and salad, then everyone went to change for our first beach patrol. I figured out how to put on my mosquito face net and headlamp, and boy were we stylin’. The mosquitoes here are no joke and totally swarm you, even with bug spray. I was grateful for the net. 

We broke up into 2 groups, and our group had 9 nests to inventory post-hatch. The first nest was god-awful. In it, along with the scores of empty shells from hatched turtles, were a lot of decomposed eggs. It was really gross, even with the latex gloves on. 

The second nest wasn’t much better. In fact, it may have even been worse, just in a different way. One of the things you have to do when you inventory a nest is break open any unhatched eggs and record the state at which they stopped developing. Almost every single egg in this nest was an unhatched baby who was 50-75% done developing. It looked like a fully formed turtle with a yolk sack attached, all curled up and soft with its eyes closed. A lot of them were partially decomposed and their scales were falling off. Some of them had turned bright, neon pink, which we learned was a bacteria.

Our third nest was better. Most of the eggs hatched, AND, we found two turtles still alive trapped inside the nest. These we collected in a bucket of sand to release later. By this point it was getting dark and we were working by the red light of our headlamps, so my pictures are all blurry of them.

We got through the rest of our nests and found two more live babies (and unfortunately a few dead ones and a lot of unhatched shells). One of our four babies was amelanistic, meaning its shell and flippers had white markings on them instead of being completely black. Not quite albino, but not normal either. 

Another one of our four babies had some kind of weakness/injury/deformity in his or her left flipper and couldn’t move it that well. I really feel for the little guy, so when it came time to let them go to the water, I chose him and made sure he got there. We released them a little ways away from the waves, but all of them kept trying to go the wrong way. When we turned around, we could see the city lights from Savannah reflecting off the clouds brighter than the moon on the waves. It is easy to see why a little turtle would get confused and wind up dead miles inland. Poor things. I’m not sure if we were supposed to help them as much as we did, but Bobby and I and the other volunteers eventually just picked them up and put them into the waves, at which point, they didn’t turn back to the light pollution coming from that far shore. Totally worth soaking my shoes and socks for.