No Waiting Game for Once – July Arribada Started Early

On Friday we picked up Cody Glasbrenner the missing person in our quintet for the first part of the season. Cody is already a veteran in sea turtle related field work and was my field assistant here in Ostional, while I was still in charge of the Leatherback and Pacific Green Sea Turtle Project. I will make sure that he will be properly introduced to all of you later on.

While picking up Cody from the airport in Liberia, we thought we could swing by the newly opened Walmart right there……well, we buried that idea quickly after seeing a hug line of cars stretching from the parking lot entrance several hundreds of meters toward the city center. The point of this story is to give you an idea of how rare things like a Walmart still are in the more rural areas, or areas farther away from the capital, in Costa Rica (and Liberia is not a small city). A “quick” stop in your next well-sorted supermarket might mean a two hour car ride.

Saturday was meant for equipment assemblage and last training sessions, but in the morning of Saturday I received a WhatsApp from a friend telling me that “la flota llego” (the arribada is here). I jumped out of bed, grabbed some equipment and made my way to the beach to see if that is true. And indeed, there it was. Several hundreds of females were crawling onto the beach in the early hours of the morning. I made two little videos, that you are able to see right HERE and HERE.

The day itself was busy after that getting everything ready for the night, and at 5 pm we were on the beach to see if females were already coming up. It was beautiful. Since the arribada was a day early, barely any people were on the beach and already hundreds of females were going about their business with the sun setting in the background. ….just MAGICAL.

During the first hours of the night I trained everyone on data collection for new turtles for this season, and then Brie took over the work, while I started to look for our “golden eggs”, the turtles we tagged on the boat. A long night and morning later, we fell into our beds exhausted….and ever since it has been a routine of rinse, sleep, eat, repeat.