"We don't have protocol for this."

The last week or so has been quite depressing.

1. The ATV broke down at the beach. We couldn't even fix it with the machete and we didn't have a second vehicle with us to pull it out. So we walked back to town. Did I mention that we did the three mile walk back   along a road that was more lake than road in the pouring rain because a hurricane had just past by? (The phrase of the day was, "It wasn't raining when we left!" and it got more pitiful the longer we were out.)

2. The ATV broke down at the beach (again). We had just gotten it back from getting "fixed." The other vehicle with us was Gene's scooter. We did push the ATV to a better spot to leave it with the scooter, but we still had to walk out. This was the day after the previous walk, so the road was a mud pit.

3. Amy got sick.

4. The night Amy got sick, Lindsey and I still had to go to the beach. It was the hottest night I have spent on the beach so far and there was no wind, so there were quite a few bugs. However, on the drive back into town we had the worst experience of the week....

5. We were attacked by a swarm of bees. Really. It was quite traumatizing. We were now driving a four-wheel drive golf cart (which is probably why we hadn't broken down again) and I was standing on the back, holding on with one hand while wildly swatting bees with the other. Lindsey was driving at full speed down the road while swatting bees. We both got stung a couple of times (I had to pull two stingers out of Lindsey's head before the night was over). In all, not an experience I want to go through again. Luckily, neither of us is badly allergic to bees and the swarm doesn't seem to have stuck around. We think that one of the trees that fell over must have disturbed the nest and we disturbed it further by driving through it.

So, in all, by Sunday morning we were all in pretty bad spirits and none of us were in the mood to spend Sunday night on the beach. However, Sunday night our stretch of bad luck broke and our spirits were completely turned around in a matter of minutes.

At 9:10, Lindsey comes back to the tarp and tells us that she and Chel found a turtle that was almost done digging her nest. We all packed things up and head down the beach all of twenty yards. This was exciting--we might actually be done early and get to go home to sleep! Also, we were hoping to deploy the satellite tag, which meant we had to start the process as soon as the turtle entered her nesting trance.

On closer inspection we discovered two things about this turtle. First, she was a new turtle--only the fourth confirmed female on this beach! Second, we could not sat tag her because there was a barnacle in the way. However, as long as she laid a nest, we decided that we would be happy.

After a couple of minutes, I headed back to our camp to pick up a couple of things we had left behind. As I walked along the bottom of the brush that lines most of the beach, I heard some rustling. My first thought was that it was either a really big crab or... another turtle. Thinking that there was no way that we could have two turtles at one time, I turned on my light. There was a turtle sitting in the bushes, less than a meter from where I was standing. To say I was surprised is putting it mildly--I nearly fell over! Turning around, I went back to where Amy and Lindsey were sitting.

"There's another turtle over there." I stumbled over the words.

They both looked at me in shock. We had had two turtles, within 10 meters of each other in 10 minutes!

Lindsey's first words? "We don't have protocol for this!"

The next four hours were busy ones. Both turtles ended up laying nests that we had to dig up and catalog, we deployed the last set of data loggers in one, and the second turtle (named "Surprise" for obvious reasons) was perfect to deploy the sat tag on.

The end result is that we are done with the beach nights needed for Lindsey's research and we were much, much happier researchers! Now, we just need to finish the beach profiling and the pollution study before the nests start hatching and we have several hundred hatchlings to process.