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!!

 

Posted with Blogsy

Welcome October!

This is crabby patty, Lauren found the dead crab on a beach walk to San Miguel one day

It is hard to believe that I have been here for seven weeks and it is already October! Time sure is flying quickly this year. Some days I start to miss home but overall I am just a little bit too busy to really get caught up in it.

Roughly, I have about ten more weeks left to go until we need to be out of the house here in Costa de Oro. I'm not sure I am going to be ready to leave this beach this year. One of the locals was asking if I was coming back next year, he seems to think I probably will. (Michelle what do you think?)

A huge stingray that we kept smelling on patrol. The barb was huge!

Friday, we went up to the office to celebrate Elias' birthday. We were given an odd assortment of vegetables and told to cook something, right away I felt like I ended up on some foodnetwork challange. Lauren, Steph, and I passed the test though and our meal was pretty all over the board. W had green beans and broccoli with salsa de soya, roasted potatoes and zucchini, and sweet plantains with a onion garlic lime sauce Lauren learned to make from a Cuban restaurant in LA. I warned you the meal was all over the place. Of course there was cake. Elias loves to make different cakes, in fact his favorite book is 1000 different cakes from all over the world. This birthday cake was a strawberry yogurt with cinnamon sugar apple slices, it was an interesting assortment of flavors.

Prepping the mural to make a mosaic of trash

We are also getting ready for San Francisco Day, which is coming up this weekend. There will be a festival in Coyote celebrating the saint in which it is named after (San Francisco de Coyote). Apparently, this year it will be a three day long festival and we are going to have a booth where we are completing the mural that we started last year that will be a mosaic made of beach trash that depicts the marine life that lives off the coast here. Due to some bigger storms and some strong currants we experienced a ton of trash on the beach, so with the help of a lot of our locals we collected a ton of trash that will be put to use on the project.

Lauren was hard at work

October 8th will put our first nest at forty days in the hatchery. The first few days are going to be import for us since we will be able to gather a rough estimate on how long our nests are taking to hatch this year. Last year, we had an extremely quick incubation time of thirty-seven days. We've been getting a bit more rain this year though, so I am expecting it to be more around forty to forty-five. But since we need to be out of the house by December 10th, we need to determine this date pretty quickly so that the hatchery will be taken down by the time we leave.

The other day we got in a new volunteer, her name in Teressa and she will be with us for about a month. She's from Dallas and decided to come to Costa Rica, quit her job and sold her house and immersed herself in the culture for a month by going to a language school in Montezuma. She studied abroad here while she was in college and was excited to come back and if she can find a good paying job she thinks she might stay for a while longer. Teressa was also part of the Peace Corps and has an extensive list of countries she has visited.

I did find the Beinvenidos sign for Costa de Oro, finally after weeks of searching!

For our beach trash study that we are working on we needed to walk down to sector 3, that is roughly a little less than 2 km from our house. We gathered two large trash bags full of trash, and we are only surveying a 20 m of the whole 100 m section. Upon looking at the whole sector, we did realize we got lucky in the sections we randomly selected to survey for the day since a mattress had washed up on shore, the only outrageous thing we had to get home was an umbrella.

October is going to be a busy month here in Costa de Oro. We have a few volunteers coming in that will be staying with us almost to the end of the project (hopefully) and a new research assistant. Unfortunately, I am going to be loosing Steph at the end of the month though. Our house will be busy with volunteers and assistants plus (fingers crossed) tons of baby turtles. I advised everyone to catch up on their sleep this week because next week we might not be sleeping to much during the night.

We got a lot going on for me to organize this month, plus towards the end of the month I need to get my butt up to Nicaragua for my visa run! I did not have to do a visa run last year since I was in the country for about 97 days, but this year I am here for an extra month so it's either visa run or a fine, and I would rather go visit Nicaragua than pay the Costa Rican government $100. Sounds like a vacation, but I have heard that it is not stop traveling plus I want to try and explore as much of what I can of Nicaragua while I'm there.

 

Posted with Blogsy