Upside down

One turtle last night. I was riding the south route on ATV while Chris scoped from the road. No turtles on our first pass. It was tricky navigating the seaweed patches and cliffs, not to mention the sneaky rain squalls that came up from behind. On his second pass Chris was lucky to spot Lyra as she was making her way back to the water. He saw her from the pier and raced down to where she was. Lyra nested first in 2001, then again in 2003. My friend Jess joined me for the rest of the night. There were lots of loggerheads and green turtles nesting on the south end. They found little dips in the scarp where they were able to climb up the beach to nest. We did not see any leatherbacks, but we did see one interesting thing. On our final pass through MacArthur park we saw a really large white rock. Once we looked a bit closer we saw that it was a green turtle that had somehow flipped over! We hurried down to see if we could help and noticed that she was on top of a few small rocks (about 5 cm up from the sand). We heaved and pushed and finally pulled her over. I guess she had gotten up over the small rocks and a wave must have come and tipped her right over. She seemed a bit disoriented and exhausted when we righted her and it took her a while to get back into the water. She eventually did, and Jess and I felt lucky that we had found her. Jess had never seen an adult green close up, so she certainly got her chance!