Friday morning started with a visit from the fish truck in our driveway. As the truck came by with a honk we hurried out to see what we would have for dinner which we cooked at home the next day.
We then drove up to Tamarindo, for groceries, souvenir shopping and to gas up the cars since despite the city being 20 kilometers away it was our closest station
The smoothies were our least favorite on the trip (we'd become mango smoothie experts by this point), :) but the food was pretty delicious.
We then went down the street to where we were told we might find some information about the turtles.
Here we found a protected area of sea turtle nests and met some volunteers from the organization Verdiazul who were very friendly and willing to tell us about their work in saving the sea turtle population. They invited us to patrol the beach with them that night.
We stayed there for a while as the beach was another great one for playing in.
The kids and I played out in the water while James (who wasn't feeling well) took pictures and talked more with the volunteers.
We enjoyed sunset at the beach before going home for a short time. The road suggested to us on our GPS was not really a road at all. We drove through rivers and huge puddles sometimes at a very odd angle, but on such a skinny trail that we couldn't turn around and go back. We made it back without getting stuck and knew to take the main road when we went back that night.
We weren't hungry for dinner, since we'd had a late lunch. So grabbed a snack and got ready to go back to the beach.
The patrolling started at 8pm. Preston and Larry stayed back at the house while the rest of us joined the 3 volunteers from the organization: one from the U.K., one from Scotland and one from Finland and started our beach walk. We couldn't use flashlights, as they didn't want turtles scared or disoriented, so we walked by the light of the moon and stars in search of turtle tracks coming up from the ocean.
We were very lucky to come across a leatherback turtle. One of the volunteers spotted the tracks, a long and wide darker section of sand. She used red lights to check on the progress and found the turtle in the process of digging her nest. They called the organization and the other volunteers all came on motorcycles as quickly as they could. Leatherbacks are extremely endangered and they were all very excited we were there to see one. It was over 4 feet long.
We waited while they turtle finished digging her nest. Once she was laying eggs we were able to go over to watch until she was done. She had 53 eggs, plus about 20 fake eggs she laid on top to discourage predators if the nest was found (those ones are smaller and don't taste good). The volunteers collected the eggs to move to their protected area which is guarded 24 hours against poachers and predators. We finished about midnight and walked about 6 miles that night, but loved the experience.
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