even though we had last night off, we could barely keep ourselves awake tonight. Jeremy and I are just in off the beach, but Chris and Niki are out there, finishing up the tags on another new leatherback - the only one tonight. she false crawled about 1/2 an hour before she came back to dig an egg chamber. we are looking forward to hearing how our satellite tagged turtles are doing, we did get fixes on them from UCF and Hubbs, but they were not close fixes. looks like Sandy and Aries have moved north for now, hopefully we will know more tomorrow.

Chris and I were looking at nest counts for Juno Beach tonight, right now we have 52 leatherback nests and last year at this time we had 74 (which was a record year).

we will be posting the tracks at this site soon:

Satellite tracking page

we took last night off and are getting ready to go out again tonight. we have just received word that Sandy and Aries are transmitting well, and have not yet heard from Bootes, but we still hope to. we will be posting regular updates at the following page:

stay tuned....

I was not able to post this yesterday due to some web problem - but this is what I wrote yesterday, the 29th of May.....

last night was far more than just a four turtle night, which was incredible in itself. we had Dr. Scott Eckert from Hubbs Sea World Research Institute, and Dr. Llewellyn Ehrhart's graduate students from the University of Central Florida join us the last two nights on our patrol. Hubbs and UCF have been working on a satellite tracking program for leatherbacks out of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge up in Melbourne Beach. in the past few years, they have placed satellite transmitters on leatherbacks and successfully tracked them to such far away places as Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the Cape Verde Islands, Virginia, and the middle of the Atlantic.

Please visit Dr. Eckert's web pages at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute.

Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute

Please visit Doc Ehrhart's web pages at the University of Central Florida. they have an amazing marine turtle research program going on there..

no leatherbacks tonight, very very quiet, even for loggerheads. we had the same kind of night 10 days ago, so if that is any indication, hopefully we will have two 3-turtle nights in a row now...Sandy is due back tomorrow night, along with Caroli.

just in from the beach. it is cold and blustery out there, a strong wind from the ENE. unless Chris spots a turtle within the next hour or so, we had only one tonight. Polaris returned and nested on south Juno Beach (Lost Tree). she first nested on our beach on May 8 but had not been seen since then. wonder where she has been - she's probably laid only one additional nest since we tagged her.

last night we had one new turtle which Jeremy and I spotted at 145 am, and Chris and Niki tagged her (Lacerta is her name). then later on, they spotted Electra nesting - 10 days since we tagged her. she is a huge turtle, and a quick nester.

one additional note from last night, well actually this morning. Niki called me at 7 am, very excited, to say she had just tagged yet another new turtle and watched it go back into the water after nesting successfully. 'sorry to wake you up,' she said, 'but she was just so beautiful!' we will get pictures of these morning nesters up on the website as soon as we have a bit of spare time.

will post later today or in the morning with names of our new turtles...this season is really going wild

It was a busy nesting night. Many Loggerheads, and I witnessed the first Green turtle nest of the season, then another, and another, and another! There were about 10 Greens on the beach when I quit at 5:00AM. Two new leatherbacks were encountered and tagged last night! I tagged a turtle at about midnight and Niki worked up a turtle on the south end of her survey area shortly after 3AM. The volunteer crew with her from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, and Palm Beach County ERM were very excited to see the turtle. I also had the honor of being observed doing my work by the original "turtle lady" of Juno Beach, Elenor Fletcher.