Curse of the parents

So I spoke too soon about not seeing any turtles last time.  After my parents left that night was a pretty exciting night for us at the house.  In total we got 4 nests, 3 turtles, 2 false crawls, and nothing was poached!

Last nights turtle patrol was a little sketchy.  We went out about 10 minutes later than planned because there was a lightening storm within probably oh a mile of us.  So we waited it out, sounded like it was going north.  There was still some heavy rain but we all were prepared for that, and dressed in a pair of pants, shoes, and my patagonia rain jacket, we braved the storm.  Courtney and I went south and made it past the rocks, I would say that is probably like 800m down the beach, and the only tracks we had were from the wood (basically tree stumps) being washed up on shore.  We noticed another lightening storm was moving in and acknowledged it was close and a good thing we turned around.  While the first bolt went horizontal in the sky, the second went straight down with the loudest thunder I can remember hearing.  Needless to say we both booked it, neither of us wanted to be the tallest thing on the beach when the next one struck (and we are both the same height).  We made a beeline for the trees while trying to figure out our best escape route.  We thought about finding a house and going to sit on the porch while we waited it out or try to get back to the main road.  Luckily we found a little beach road that led to the street our house is on. It was probably a ten minute walk through a lot of puddles, saw crabs running everywhere and even a toad.  We've been told that we won't see poachers on a night that there is lightening, because Ticos are afraid of lightening, I'm thinking that they are smart and don't see poaching as worth the risk.

So this was written a few days ago, and I haven't had any turtles since so still have not seen the whole process, yet.

There are so many sand dollars 

 The beach is covered with these huge pieces of wood that cover the beach.  During the rain storm these weren't much help, we kept having to flash the lights to make sure it was just tracks from the stumps and not turtle tracks.  

Here is a Costa de Oro sunset, once you see it you understand why the beach is called the Gold Coast.  The sand even turns this gold color in the light. 

This one is directly right in fornt of our house, we have a nice little beach break.  This was taken during the same sunset as the one above, it's cool to see how the colors reflect different at different sections of the sunset.