San Francisco Day

This weekend we have the fiesta in Coyote at the Church celebrating San Francisco. Last year, if I remember correctly, Tom (Courtney's dad) was in town and we were trying to find the festival but were unsuccessful in our quest, we couldn't locate the Church or a gathering of people. The festival this year is bigger and it was so easy to find it when we went up to Coyote! Might have something to do with the signs that were painted by the Turtle Trax group.

Last week we spent time up at the office preparing welcome, bathroom, recycling and trash signs, and prepping the trash mosaic. They all looked awesome and hopefully they were put to good use (people actually read them and put their trash in the appropriate bins). Yesterday, we went up to help with the festival, and by help we sat in the office cutting up pieces of beach trash to put on the mural, which was going to be the activity for today. It was a good thing to prep since it was also raining out not sure that trying to glue plastic on to the plywood would have worked in the rain. Lauren, Teresa, myself, and with the help of Luca (from Brazil and is training to work in fisheries for the next few months with PRETOMA) sat around a bucket of beach trash and laughed at all the weird things we were finding.

Welcome sign

When lunch time rolled around we went up to the Church to check out what was going on. There was a DJ playing music, ladies serving food from the kitchen in the church, and little activities going on for the kids. (For my family and any other Japanese readers out there it was pretty much Costa Rican Obon). Lauren and I each got a carne asada plate, which literally was just a piece of carne asada on a corn tortilla, it might have been nice if it included some rice and beans but I'm not complaining too much since it did only cost $2. We hung out for a little bit to eat our lunch with Lotti, Erik, Sophie, a couple guys from Caletes, and Luca. The DJ started playing Ai Se Eu Te Pego, which is actually a Brazilian song, and Luca rolled his eyes (this song is played in Michelina's video of the turtles from last year that I posted). Lucky for Luca, the song was cut short so we could enjoy the mariachi band. I thought they were playing inside the Church, but when I looked around I found them in the kitchen with other people gathered around in the kitchen dancing!

Carne asada and tortilla.

The weather has been so different from October last year, or at least from what I can remember. It seems like as soon as October 1st hit that we have just been having rainy day after rainy day. Luckily today was sunshine all morning so I was able to get some laundry done. The rain will probably alter the incubation time of our nests though, now expecting the first ones to take a little longer than expected because the temperatures have dropped. Olive ridely turtles usually take about 45 days to hatch, last year because it was so dry we were seeing them hatch as soon as 37 days. This will impact how long we can relocate nests to the hatchery before we begin to relocated eggs on the beach.

I'm not sure if it due to the rain or the sun or just weathering in general, but, the sand bags around the hatchery have begun to rip and break. The material that holds the bags together is just becoming thing and falling apart. I cleaned some more sacks the other day so Lauren and I spent the afternoon filling up sacks and reinforcing the hatchery where sand bags have broken or are about to break. Luckily, due to the weather we were able to work on it in the middle of the day.

Hatchery Update!!

We have now begun to circle back around in the hatchery. We fill it like a checker board so first we filled in all the black squares and now we are going in and filling in all the white ones.

Eggs in hatchery: 4,446

Nests in hatchery: 48

Nesting events: 169

Babies to come next week!!

 

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