Arrival in Ostional and Training Day
Our season is officially on. On Friday we picked up our two field assistants Stephanie and Hunter from the San Jose Airport. Poor Hunter had to make a detour to Liberia and back to San Jose with his plane because the airport was closed for several hours due to thick fog lingering in the Central Valley. Some people said the fog is part of the rainy season (“el tiempo”) others said it was the fault of the Volcano Poas, which has been extremely active lately. Hunter finally made it, though, and we were able to follow or initial plan to drive to the Pacific coast to Ostional (our home base during the season) the next day. After just a few hours of sleep for Hunter, we loaded up our faithful Hercules (the name we gave our car last year) and headed west. We only had four people to transport during the first leg till Santa Cruz, we still had to fit about 300 pounds worth of equipment, including a 10L liquid nitrogen tank (already filled with nitrogen), and our personal luggage into the car. I think I am not lying when I am saying that we were cargados como una mula with things piled up to the roof and no wiggle space left. Once we got to Santa Cruz, we had to fit our beloved project mom Yami into the car with a few of her belongings (luckily she didn’t have her message table with her ;-) ). From Santa Cruz it was a fun two hour trip, driving into Ostional over gravel roads with massive holes.
Exhausted and after a generally smooth voyaged we arrived in Ostional in the late afternoon and after unloading the car, we all rushed to the beach to watch our first sunset of the season. Oh how I have missed the tranquility of sitting on my favourite log of the season and watching the huge globe of fire sink below the horizon….. Every sunset is unique and it is the time of the day where I can gather my thoughts, reflect on the day, and meditate a bit.
Today was a busy day. We unpacked and organized the equipment in the morning and started packing our work bags and boxes for our upcoming boat work. The afternoon I used to train and refresh everyone’s field skills. We went over how to behaviour around sea turtles (i.e. using red light, approaching from behind etc. pp), how to collect data on nesting seas turtles, as well as the theory of capturing a sea turtle in the water. We ended our training session with a treasure hunt for a hidden radio transmitter to practice locating turtles on the beach that will carry a VHF radio transmitter. Stephanie and Hunter did well.
The upcoming weeks will be exciting, as we will start our work on the boat. We will capture female turtles and install (with epoxy glue) VHF radio transmitters to their carapace so we will be able to find them again when they come to nest.
I am planning to go live at least once during one of our boat days, so you will be able to follow us live for some minutes. We tried another live video with a hatchling release we assisted in on the Caribbean coast. If you missed it, you can re-watch it, here.
Right now it is planned to go live on TUESDAY July 11th between 9 and 10 AM Costa Rican time, so you can pencil us in on your calendars in case you would like to join us for this adventure.
Now I am sitting once again on my log waiting for the sun to settle so I can go home (to my host family’s house) and get some writing done. The latter is probably one of my biggest personal challenges in the field. There is usually either not enough time, or no internet, or no electricity, or –once the season advances- I am so sleep deprived that either my brain is constantly on stand-by or I just fall asleep as soon as I am sitting down somewhere. This year though I have been carving out more windows to get things done (hopefully ;-) ).
I hope you will join me for the next blog post and/or for our next live video!!
