Turtle Rescue

We heard about a sea turtle hospital during the Turtle Talk at Holden Beach and found out that give tours, so we decided to detour on our way home up to Surf City and check it out. They are a facility that rehabilitates sick and injured sea turtles from up and down the east coast. A large number are turtles that didn't make it out to warmer waters before the winter hit in New England and have to be shipped down here to recover from nearly freezing to death. 

They're kept in these huge pools and are fed, brushed (though some don't like that much) and examined daily by trained medical staff in the hopes that they will eventually be released back in to the ocean.

They range in size from 200+ lbs down to 10 lbs.

They do have one permanent resident because the turtle is blind and wouldn't be able to survive in the wild. 

This one had had a major wound on its shell, probably from a boat propeller, so they had to put medicine and lotions on it every few hours.

He was not happy about the process and was constantly slapping his flippers on the table trying to get away.

Turtle Nest walk

One evening at the Holden Beach Town Hall, they had a session of "Turtle Talk" where the local volunteers explained about the sea turtles that nest on the beaches at this time of year and what they to do protect both the turtles and the nests. One big thing they do is they mark where each nest is with caution tape, a sign and a length of plastic webbing that prevents animals from digging up the eggs. Holden Beach gets about 175 nests each year on it's 7-mile length (which is small compared to places like Topsail that gets in the tens of thousands) and these folks try to find and mark every single one. So far this year, they had marked about a dozen.

The next evening, we took a walk on the beach to see if we could find any of the nests that had been marked so far.

There was a pretty cool sandbar that the waves would wash over and make a sort of river that ran along between it and the main beach.

There were tons of shells along the beach.

The kids found some super thick clam shells

and some broken whelk shells.

Along our mile-plus walk, we found 3 nests.

We also found a turtle! :)

Irene wanted to stop every 5 feet to dig through the sand for shells.

The littles had a lot of fun running in the sand, though they weren't quite as cheerful on the walk back...

On the way back, we finally got to see a little sun in the form of a gorgeous sunset.