Well, internet access here in paradise is sketchy, to say the least. We are however more than pleased to have any of it at all. With that in mind, here is a summary of what we took notes on while we worked.
We are thoroughly sleep deprived, but loving every moment of it. Every spare second that isn't spent working to help as many sea turtles enter the wild safely, is spent either sleeping, or diving. With those as the three activities, sleep is left to a few measly hours a night, never more than four at a go.
The
Bubbles Turtle & Coral Project and those who run it, is/are truly incredible. The resort is such a slice of paradise, its hard to believe. A small place with a private beach and bay, its just a few wonderful guests, significantly fewer volunteers and staff working with the turtles, and the South China Sea. Toss in a bit of Malaysian jungle, and its a recipe for an unforgettable experience. The diving we do, as well as nightly educational lessons to the guests called 'Turtle Talks' (we will give one here in writing very soon!) are critical pieces of the conservation project, in my humble opinion. Each person can only do so much, and the more people that are educated and taught to appreciate the delicate ecosystem, the greater chance that these precious creatures will return to the very beach they hatched on after more than 30 years at sea. Along with teaching appreciation, while diving we work to maintain and grow the Bubbles 'house reefs'. In the decades to come these reefs will help to ensure that this beach is still available to the turtles that come here to nest. As you can imagine with that lengthy maturation process, it will be a whole new generation of conservationists that are here at this beach, and similar beaches world wide, when this years' hatchlings come back to nest.
We released no fewer than 135 baby turtles to be free in the wild. Krissy fell in love with each and every one. Sadly with a survival rate of just 1/5000, the chances of any of those babies surviving to return to this beach in 30 years is small. More than 80% of the eggs that are laid on this beach are turned over to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, for better or worse, which is why in a one week period when a single nest can be 135 eggs or more, we release only that many.
Regardless, every little bit helps. With the addition of programs such as ours, in recent years that survival rate has rocketed from the atrocious rate of 1/10,000. We can only hope that survival rate keeps on climbing.
So, to those parties who are interested, here is a (probably exhaustingly thorough) rundown of how we spent our days. Maybe you are interested in volunteering this program, or a similar one. Maybe you just want to know how we spent our time. Regardless, every second was worth it. We wish we could have stayed longer, and
will be back. After almost a year of travel, enjoying what the world and its people have to offer, and finding out a lot about ourselves, we truly appreciated the opportunity to be here and give something back. We sincerely hope that in another 30 years when these hatchlings come back to this very beach, there will be such an incredibly beautiful place for them to return to.
On a side note, this was painstakingly typed out on our iPhone (as with all the recent posts - since our laptops went kaput) so please forgive spelling and formatting errors.
15/8
10:15 am - Our boat to Bubbles from Kuala Besut
11 am - arrive on the most perfect beautiful beach, in a coral bay with clear calm aquamarine water. There are no roads or vehicles other than boats here, indeed it would be impossible. A small bay, with just the right size beach, and impassable jungle hills all around.
1:00 pm - met our 'boss', had first buffet lunch
3:00 snorkeling with volunteers!
Cards (Uno, anyone?), hangin out
9:30pm - release baby turtles!! (4)
16/8
12:00 midnight - most people head to bed, Chris volunteers to stay up with our 'chief' so she doesn't have to do her shift alone. Poachers - yikes!
3:10am - Chris' shift over, heads to bed.
9:00 am - first SCUBA class!! Videos and book work
1:00 pm - more scuba class, videos and bookwork.
4:00 pm - free time. Beach, swimming, etc.
8:00 pm - first 'turtle watch' shift starts. Hatchlings! (41)
9:30 pm - release baby turtles!! (41)
17/8
7:00 am - hatchlings during the late shift while we slept. (29)
9:00 am - SCUBA class! Dive skills, and first dive!! Amazing. Practiced partial mask clear underwater, buddy breathing
11:45 am - fire ants discovered in the hatchery! Three nests attacked. Fortunately some hatchlings had come out earlier. We lost some. :-( We saved more than we lost however - in the wild the whole nests would have been lost. Picking dozens of fire ants off of the few turtles that had hatched and not emerged was heartbreaking.
2:00 pm - head to dive class, but instructors went diving. Decided to nap.
4:20 pm - check in for dive class, postponed til the next day. Very sad we interrupted our naps, tried to sleep more and failed.
8:00 pm - turtle watch shift starts.
9:00 pm - release baby turtles! (29 - 4 brought back for next release)
18/8
1:30 am - released 8 more babies. Swim and be free!
4:30 am - while we slept. Poachers! Pulled their boat up to the beach and despite our people showing up, got out to have a look at the beach. Upon friendly questioning, indicated that they were looking for turtles. How cheeky. They got back in their boat and left.
9:00 am - SCUBA class! Skills testing. Removing mask, weights and BCD underwater, and at surface. Tired diver assisting. (push and pull) buoyancy tests. Cramp removal, self and buddy. Also tested 'running out of air'. Instructor turned off our tank underwater and let us experience feeling it 'run dry'. Yikes!
Krissy had a few minor blonde moments. First when trying to practice removing her cramps, she couldn't reach her flipper, and in trying kept tipping forward and dunking her face. I mentioned she might try bending her knee and grabbing on, then extending leg. Whoops! Later when removing and replacing mask underwater, she had trouble clearing out the seawater. She was blowing out her mouth, not her nose. Hehe!
One other minor issue - the cute yellow and blue striped damsel fish love the taste of Krissy! About 2 inches long and seemingly harmless, they dart at her repeatedly, and occasionally take a chomp!
11:00 am - clean gear, and prepare dive 'kit' for after lunch dive.
11:15 am - free time. Quick swim, then chill.
1:00 pm - dive two! Gambon? Amazing! Great vis, amazing corals and fish.
3:00 pm - dive complete, clean kit and prepare for third dive of the day, after some decompression time.
4:00 pm - dive three. House reef two. Saw male green sea turtle. First on bottom, then swimming. Visibility was quite shit. First low-vis dive.
6:00 pm - dive complete, clean and put away kit. Shower and dry, very 'pruny'.
8:30 pm - hanging out with James the dive shop manager, chatting, and playing ukulele. He has one also.
10:30 pm - go for a bit of sleep before the late shift.
19/8
Nesting turtle!
3:00 am - start work, discover that first shift has been dealing with a turtle!
4:00 am - while waiting for the turtle to finish burying her nest, I take a few minutes to sit and take it all in. It's truly one of life's most incredible moments. With the (endangered?) sea turtle continuing its struggle to keep its race alive a few feet away, I look out to sea from our tiny remote jungle island beach. Bio-luminescents flash in the water as the waves gently crash on shore. Fireflies flutter along the beach, their green light nearly the same as that of those in the water. A brilliant mass of stars light the southern sky, and shooting stars are racing across it all. The swishing of our turtle friend burying her nest, and the waves of the south china sea beating their endless rhythm, are the only additions to the complete silence. Few moments could possibly hold more magic.
4:30 am - nest is buried, turtle slips into the sea. We begin digging it up to move to hatchery.
5:00 am - DFW (Department of Fish and Wildlife) comes, takes their eggs. It was them, not poachers the previous night. Between their language barrier and 'islander' attitude, head volunteer misidentified them. Whoops!
7:00 am - early finish, off to bed!
10:00 am - Chris wakes, heads to the beach to chill, something we have done very little of.
11:00 am - Krissy wakes, heads to beach for a morning yoga!
1:00 pm - 'nest review' meeting. Discuss what went right and what went wrong with handling the nest the previous night. Mostly all good.
2:00 pm - diving! D'lagoon - beautiful corals, incredible visibility, and it's our first dive with no training or skills, just enjoying! Fun. Another diver took some pictures of us, hope to get some!
4:00 pm - return from dive, clean kit, shower off.
5:00 pm - last chapter of theory. Exam tomorrow!
6:15 pm - theory done, head over to do work in the hatchery.
7:45 pm - straight from the hatchery to dinner.
9:00 pm - released hatchlings! (53)
9:45 pm - on our way back from release, we discover another nesting turtle!
10:15 pm - after watching the turtle find its nest sight and start digging, we head to bed, late shift
tonight.
20/8
3:00 am - late shift starts. 96 eggs in the nest from earlier. Our last shift, and our only one without boss or chief.
3:45 am - poachers!? We heard a boat in the bay. A slow pass on the beach with bright lights looking for tracks. Since the best earlier was at a high tide, and now it's low, there is a big stretch of bare sand, and they don't notice any tracks. After a few minutes they head off.
4:30 am - with our final exam for our SCUBA certification today, we go trough our study books and quiz each other on anything and everything we think may appear on the 50 question test.
6:15 am - krissy and I sit and soak up our incredible atmosphere yet again. The world is just starting to glow with that soft light and colors that exist only in these brief tropical moments. How lucky we are.
8:00 am - not being sure that we were tired enough for sleep (...!) we decide to get some exercise. Krissy enjoys a warm tropical yoga in the sand, while I run laps on our small private beach, and we both wrap up with some strength training. Our routines vary little, as it's something we are now quite used to having perfected gaining some exercise with no access to equipment. Push-ups, sit-ups, plank. Find something a bit elevated ( a stair, the edge of a bed, or a log) and do some dips. When I have the luxury of finding somehing I can dangle from, I eagerly do pull-ups until my hands blister, since it's rarely somehing that is well suited to the task. Worth it.
8:45 am -
After our exercise with the sun rapidly rising over the hill, and light streaming across the beach, we enjoy another swim in the warm saltwater that one could never tire of.
9:00 am - a quick bit of breakfast and some coffee to keep the energy up, we enjoy a quiet morning of snorkeling and enjoying the beach.
11:00 am - exam time! We both do quite well, and are now certified scuba divers, trained at depths of up to 18 meters (60 feet). What an incredible experience it was learning to do this, especially while participating I the conservation project. Always keeping in mind the turtles and the environments that are important to heir life cycle. We help maintain the two 'house reefs' which the resort is growing to ensure the future holds more than enough life to sustain the nesting population. The turtles know the smell of their home waters, the makeup of the local corals, and the mineral contents of the sands and use all those things to find the very beach they were hatched on some 30 years prior to their first nesting period.
1:00 pm - we insist on some pictures with the rest of our team, to help immortalize this experience for us.
1:30 pm - help with the chores that our project has determined fit within its scope on the resort. We clean he beach of garbage and litter washed up from the sea, to ensure the turtles continue to find it a habitable place to nest. We collect and sort the resort's recycling, since this can be sold to a local who periodically drops by on his boat, for a small amount of money that can go back into he project for buying supplies. And one of our primary chores, of course, is maintaining the hatchery. Turtles hatch about every day his time of year on our paradisaical beach, and the nests need to be carefully cleaned and prepared should we receive another mother laying her eggs. We use only the clean magical sand from below the tide line. We carefully place layers of screens and laboriously use a double nest-within-a-nest strategy to help keep out fire ants, the devils.
3:00 pm - chores done, we gather as a group and do some brainstorming. Our amazing project coordinator is always looking for ways to improve on our facilities, never content with the status quo. We know right now what we have works. Temperature, drainage, etc. we hatch eggs nearly every day. But there is always room for improvement. Today's big question is: Can we create a nest that allows for transparency (literally) to the eggs. A display nest that still meets all our known criteria for bathing healthy turtles, while providing a visible experience for the resort guests to enjoy, and visual data for the project staff and volunteers to work with. We come up with a plausible, workable, visually appealing design that we are all pretty happy with. Prototypes will need to be built, experiments to ensure all parameters are still met. This will extend far beyond our time on the project, but we demand pictures if/when it happens. Our lasting legacy for the turtles.
3:45 pm - we kit up for our first certified dive! Today a new dive master started work at the resort, a young girl who it turns out is from Seattle! She also has spent a year in Australia, and the three of us reminisce about Oz, home, and everything in between. Then we dive!
5:30 pm - our last dive is over at Bubbles Dive Resort, Perhentian Islands, Malaysia. How rad has it been? Words don't do it justice. We have bitter/sweet feelings as we clean and hang our kits forge last time.
6:30 pm - its been a long day and early in the morning we will take a boat back to he mainland, and then a long bus ride to Kuala Lumpur. We begin packing our bags up. 6 nights here has been our longest stop, we think, since we left Byron nearly four months previous.
9:00 pm - after dinner we sit and chat with the team, laughing and enjoying our last evening. We exchange a few photos between each other, and say goodbyes.
10:00 pm - we head to bed. Our first night since we arrived without a shift to patrol the beach, we are happily allowed to rest before we head out. Enough time for at least eight hours sleep! Easily double the single-session sleep record for the last week.
21/8
6:30 am - alarm goes off. Despite a wonderful long sleep, we both wake groggily. Clearly we have more catching up to do. We didn't get much sleep, but we did get experiences that will absolutely last us a lifetime. A more than fair trade.
8:00 am - boat out to he mainland. While we gently bounce across the calm morning waters, we look back at our quiet bay, and chat about the experiences there. We both agree it is one of those rare special places in this world, and are determined to return. Soon.
9:00 board our bus for the journey to Kuala Lumpur. We are told it's about a 10 hour ride, but knowing Asia like we now do, expect 12-14.
