Turtle Trip, Day 8 (Saturday): Savannah

We released the last batch of stragglers at dawn, and got some pictures of Platymoose with hatchlings.  Then we went back to have breakfast and pack up camp.  Since it was the last week of volunteers at the project, everything needed to be cleaned and packed up to be brought down to the dock and loaded into boats to get back to shore.

Waiting for the boat to bring us to shore.

When we were approaching shore, the rain started, and when we got there, the ramp had been taken off the dock and we had to pass stuff over the water gap and then jump over ourselves in the downpour.  It was a pretty unceremonious goodbye as everyone scurried to put stuff into cars and get out of the rain.

You can see the hurricane coming as we ride the boat to the mainland.

The marina on the mainland in a brief respite from the rain while we waited for our car.

We waited over an hour for Enterprise to pick us up because apparently nobody has any clue over there.  Now we have less time to hang out and do touristy stuff before our flight.  I’m a little annoyed.  We did meet a really cute dog on the docks while we were waiting though, and the marina people are mostly really nice.

One thing that really annoyed me, however, was that I got a really bad muscle tear because one of them was a low-level misogynist.  Let me explain.  As I mentioned above, there was a gap between the boat and the dock, and Bobby had already been relegated to helping haul equipment elsewhere, so one of the dock hands was trying to be helpful and asked if I needed a hand getting over the gap to shore.  Now, normally, I probably would have been able to handle it on my own, but several factors were working against me:  I was only two months out of surgery at that point and had limited use of my left arm, it was raining, I was too short to reach the railing on the deck, and the boat wasn't really tied to anything and so there was an uneven gap over the water.  So I explicitly told the guy holding out his hand, "Just let me hold on and pull myself up."  He responded, "I can lift you onto the dock, real easy."  Me, "No, just hold me steady, I can do the rest myself."  You can kind of guess where this is going.

The guy did not just let me pull myself up, but instead as soon as he had a grip on my good arm yanked and literally lifted me up to the dock.  The problem with this is that I was not ready, I was not expecting this, and he didn't bother to actually look at me and see if I was in a good position to be yanked onto the dock against my will.  What wound up happening is my left leg was still inside of the boat while my right was on the dock, and the guy lifted more forward than up, forcing my leg into a lateral split against the side of the boat.  Well, I have never been able to do splits in my entire life, even when I was warmed up and stretching every day for silks class.  So I certainly wasn't going to be able to do one here after months of no athletic activity, no warm-up, while it's cold and raining, and I've been sitting in a boat for an hour.  I felt and I swear I could almost hear the muscle in my inner thigh tearing.

Fast forward 8 months and I've gone through countless hours of physical therapy and exercises, which the fucking deck hand isn't paying for even though he's the one who injured me, and while I've gotten maybe 80% of my strength and mobility back and they've discharged me, I'm never going to be fully healed there.  All because some fucking misogynist southern bumpkin didn't listen to a woman and couldn't possibly believe she could know what she's talking about and be capable of what she says she is.  And even though I loudly said, "Ow!" when he yanked me up, and told him that my leg hurt, he didn't seem concerned or feel bad that his not listening to me hurt me.  I bet he went home that day all fucking proud of how he helped a lady out.  God fucking damn it.  I hate him and I hate all men in the south like him who don't understand that women are people to be listened to.

The name on the street sign is what I think about that.

We finally got our car and by then were hungry so we looked up the best BBQ in Savannah and wound up at a hole in the wall place with really good ribs and pulled pork.  It only had outdoor seating, and it was raining, so the proprietor of the barbecue place said that the bar next door would let us wait out the rain and even eat there, and he’d bring us our food in there.

Platymoose made a friend!

Oh, his friend is a tip jar.  Still cute.

Literal hole in the wall restaurant, but really good food.

So, we go to the bar next door and repeat what the guy said to us, and we take a seat by the bar to wait.  It was only about noon, and there were two middle-aged ladies tending bar, both of them smoking (which I guess is still legal in Georgia), and chatting with the five old men inhabiting the bar at such an hour, talking about mutual acquaintances that they hate.  There was a sign posted above the bar that read, “Don’t talk about yourself...we’ll do it for you after you leave.”  I 100% believe they will.

The bar was really dimly lit, obviously smelled like smoke, and had some interesting choices for décor.  The drop-down ceiling tiles were decorated, presumably by regulars, with a variety of...unique...artwork; some of it was actually pretty cool and had a biker-tattoo vibe to it or incorporated shells or other fun objects, some of it was just people’s names, but some of it was crudely drawn pictures of naked women, to complement the naked ladies from 1970s porn magazines who also adorned some of the walls, alongside confederate flags.

Up until this point, I hadn’t really felt like Georgia was all that different from New England, and even afterward when we were strolling through downtown and spotting some of the confederacy soldier monuments around town, I didn’t really feel like I was out of place.  On the island, the other volunteers were mostly local or from other southern states, like Alabama and North Carolina, and for the most part seemed like-minded.  I left thinking that maybe the south isn’t as full of conservative crackpots as we’d always been told.  But then you see confederate flags and “The south will rise again.” and you go, “Nope, this is normal here; I’m out.”  When the guy gave us our food, we took it to the car and got away from that place as quickly as we could to go eat in a parking lot somewhere, even though by then the rain had stopped and we could have eaten at the tables outside.

The food itself was really, really good.  The meat fell right off the ribs, the bbq sauce in the pulled pork sandwich was just right, and even the sides were delicious.   Apparently you can deep fry bits of creamed corn and it’s way better than you would expect.

I forget what they called them, but they were delicious.

After eating, we went downtown to market square and walked by all the little shops and touristy places, stepped into some cute little art galleries, and sampled gourmet candies and cookies from a few of the shops.  We visited the park where Forrest Gump was filmed sitting on a bench, saw a neat water fountain, and then had to get ourselves to the airport.

The little baby cookies at this place were amazing.

Sweets factory.

Decisions, decisions.

Cool place to jump if it weren't so rainy.  Also fun name.

Fun-looking plant in one of the parks.  Don't know what it is.

Click to zoom in to see text.  It's a monument to black revolutionary war soldiers.  The south can keep their civil war monuments if they put up more like this right next to them.

One of the monuments in Savannah.  Bobby has more pictures of stuff from that day because my phone was dying by then.

Click to zoom in.  This monument is to Nathanael Greene, from Rhode Island, who fought in the revolutionary war in Georgia alongside Washington and other famous patriots.  I had to include this because of my RI roots.

Before these guys took it over, we played with this big xylophone-like instrument/public art piece.  'Twas fun.

The connecting flight to Charlotte was short and uneventful, minus the fact that the speakers were too loud and I got a headache from the announcements, even with plugging my ears.

Our flight to Bradley got delayed, though, so now we have a four hour layover.  Not really enough time to go and do anything, but way too long to just sit in an airport.  Plus that means we’ll be getting home really late, which is super annoying.  I just want to see my dog and sleep in a bed with no sand and take a shower with hot water and no mosquitoes in it.

We did get home super late at night, and Akasho was thrilled to see us.  The next morning, he wouldn't let us out of his sight.  Adorable.

Turtle Trip, Day 7 (Friday): Sand and turtles and hurricane on its way

Turtles going into the Atlantic Ocean at sunset.

On one of our patrols this week, we kept driving by flocks of birds, some kind of plover I think, and the noise of the mule kept startling them.  Usually, this would mean they fly off a ways and settle down again.  However, some groups of birds flew in the same direction we were going, and they happened to be going the same speed as us, so it looked like they were hanging stationary in the air next to us as the background blurred past.  I felt a little bad that we were disturbing them, but eventually the bird brains figured out that they could turn around and actually fly away from us.  Plus, it did look really cool.

See how the line of birds extends all the way down the beach.

Taking flight.

I slept until just about 9:00 this morning and our digs started at 9:30.  Bobby, Nawdane, and I went with Kris’s group to the south side and dug the remaining six nests we had to dig, and most of them had decent hatch rates.  We also found a lot of live babies, some still partially in eggs, and quite a few still viable unhatched eggs.  These all would rot or not hatch fully or not be able to dig their way out without the help of their siblings if left in the nest.  Most of these guys we will release at dusk.  We also took down all the markers that divided and numbered the beach into sections to make nests easier to locate.  I guess they have to do this every year on the last week anyway.

When we got back for lunch, we got a hurricane Dorian update.  It has shifted course and will actually hit this area, though not until next week.  What this means, though, is that we have to pull up the protection from all the unhatched nests so it doesn’t get washed away in the storm surge.  Putting plastic into the ocean is kind of the opposite of what we do here.  It does mean that the nests will be fair game for predators on the island, which is a bummer.  Kris keeps reminding everyone (and herself) that their reproductive strategy of laying so many over the course of the summer ensures that one storm won’t wipe out their whole population.

I just liked the pattern the grass made in the sand from the wind.

Ghost crab tracks.

Mostly ghost crab tracks and some turtle ones leading from a nest hole.

I just liked how the sand here was all wavy from the wind.

Nawdane and I took one mule, Bobby and Kris in another, and the others also split into teams of two per atv.  We took up all the corrals of the unhatched nests, and Bobby and Kris dug the remaining hatched or old ones, finding one more baby to release tonight.  The other teams were doing the same on the north side of the beach.

The horseshoe crabs here get much bigger than the ones back home.

Storm's a brewin'.

Bobby and I with the marker that leads back to camp.

Turtles from morning patrols to be released when it's cooler at sunset.

Our mules had never been so full of equipment.  I took a picture of three of them which happened to be heading back to base at the same time because the caravan of atvs was funny to me.  When we all got back, we had to unload and take apart the corrals, and apparently none of the blades on this island are sharp enough to efficiently cut zip ties.  I asked about using reusable ones, but Kris said they tried that one year and they couldn’t undo most of them and had to cut them anyway.  I know they can be finicky, but still, there has got to be a better way.  Maybe sand got stuck in all the release tabs.  I wouldn’t be surprised.

Each reflector had a tag on it with the nest's assigned number, which we had to cut off as we put things away.

Reflectors to mark nests, a bucket of stakes that kept the mesh down, and some corrals.

Getting windy.

This is how most of the nests are corralled when it's close to hatching time.

Nawdane driving the mule.

Me pretending to drive the mule.

Caravan of mules.

The sand here is pervasive.  It permeates everything.  The grains are so fine that they get through the weave of pretty much any kind of material, so it gets everywhere.  The most annoying thing is when you think you’ve brushed it off your bed, but then you lift the sheet to get in and there is more, because it has fallen through the sheet.  Then you brush off between the sheets and somehow there is still more, as if it escaped to the mattress cover and then came bubbling back up.  Sleeping on top of the sheets invites mosquitoes who seem to come and go in the cabin as they please.  Almost every night, I have doused myself in bug spray before hitting the hay, which makes you feel hotter because your skin can’t breathe, but that’s the trade-off for no, or at least fewer, bug bites.  It was particularly windy on the beach today, so after we finished with the corrals, I braved the shower again.  This time, in addition to being mosquito central, there were a number of small brown crabs hanging around.  I saw one climbing right up the wall of the shower stall and freaked out for a second because I thought it was a huge spider, so I started to exclaim but realized in the middle of it what I was looking at, so what came out was a very surprised and genuine, “Holy crab!”

The finished tile with the rest of the group's signatures and flair.

I didn't get any pictures of the shower crab, but here are some lovely pictures of butterflies on some of the island's vegetation.  When you conserve habitat for one species, everything else in their ecosystem benefits.

I know they're not monarchs, though they do look similar.  Don't know what they are, though.

Then I read for a little while, did some more packing, and joined everyone for supper, which was spaghetti with meat and mushroom sauce.  Afterward, we went to the ocean with the hatchlings we had collected earlier who were ready to go.  They were moving around in such a frenzy in the bucket, it actually sounded like water boiling.

We went to the coast and let them all go.  The pre-hurricane surf brought in a lot of rack, or, ocean debris (mostly plant matter).  This was an extra barrier for the hatchlings, and many of them got stuck and tangled up in it, so we helped them get through it (probably more than we strictly are supposed to interfere, but I wasn’t going to let a baby turtle get stranded on my watch).  Seeing these babies skitter and scurry into the surf with such energy and enthusiasm, especially when there are so many of them (over a hundred in some nests) really is something else.

I think anyone who experiences this, especially after witnessing first hand the destruction that a changing climate, rising seas, and higher tides can bring, will be motivated even more to try to save the planet.  It is possible for nature to recover if we actively help and stop destroying it.  This island is a case in point.  Loggerheads take 30-40 years to reach sexual maturity (a.k.a. being able to start reproducing).  This island started protecting and researching loggerheads in the 1970s.  The last few years have seen a significant jump in numbers of nests laid, as well as previously untagged mother turtles.  This year was a record year, with 480 nests, each with anywhere from 50 to 150 eggs.  What this means is that the conservation efforts happening here are really working.  The turtles that the researchers and volunteers protected from predators before I was born have grown up and returned home to breed.

If every nesting site was protected like this, sea turtles most likely wouldn’t be endangered.  The unfortunate truth is that people with money would rather have private beach resorts and their own personal islands than protect endangered species.  People would rather harvest turtles for voodoo nonsense, unnecessary black market meat (is fish and chicken and all the other domesticated animals that we are not running out of really not good enough?), and status symbols, than make half an effort to stop doing harm to our planet’s longest-living animal family.

How is this not worth protecting?

Anyway, that’s enough of my soap box for now.  I packed everything I am not wearing or using for tomorrow and I am going to try to go to sleep, despite the record number of bug bites I got from being outside pretty much all day and sweating the bug spray off repeatedly.  Tomorrow at dawn we are doing another release, of any that weren’t ready to break out of their shell and go charging down the beach earlier tonight.

Then we have to help clean and pack up the whole island because this is the final week for volunteers on this project.  Our boats will be waiting at the docks at 9:30am.  Bobby and I have a bit of time to kill before our plane leaves tomorrow, so we plan on renting a car and finding touristy things to do in Savannah.  This trip has been difficult and frustrating, both physically and emotionally, but I think it has all been worth it.  And a release of hatchlings is the perfect way to end the week.

Sunset.

Turtle tracks.