I Saved Two

and photographed a bunch more. Sorry I can't show you the whole video; at 2 min & 57 sec it eats up 287 MB and Blogger in its infinite wisdom limits all video to 100 MB, which at the highest resolution on my camera, 30 fps, translates to about a minute of footage.
The first hatchling I rescued had flipped over on his back in a footprint--yes, they are that small. So I flipped him back over and got some video of him on the beach but I lost him in the water. The second one was north of where the ranger was; he had been picked up by a seagull but apparently he was too heavy to carry, so the gull dropped him for a minute, saw me and vamoosed. He was obviously hurt but still game for the water, so I helped him into the surf and saw him off. It's either feast or famine with these critters.

Sailboat Update, Part 2

Well, as you can see, Sea Fever has been stripped of her sails and demasted. How ignoble an end for such a fine sailboat. The last couple of times I've been to the beach I've gotten so many turtle videos which I'll try to post--my computer's giving me technical difficulties, otherwise known as very low memory, so things are a bit sticky at this point.

In other news, I'm trying to sell my car because the job situation is quite bleak. I'm probably going to have to move also. Not a pretty picture, but that seems to be what the future holds. What happens with the car will tell the tale, this weekend or beyond. We shall see.

Baby Sea Turtle Bonanza

On Thursday I counted five baby sea turtles--two on Singer Island, being chaperoned by two turtle girls, and three in North Palm Beach. These are the last two--this was behind the north end of Lost Tree Village. Tracks were everywhere, so looks as though we will have a bumper crop this year.
In other news, I also saw an open position at Dwyer High School, just north of me for a Social Science/English position which I applied for, after I received official termination papers from the U.S. Census Bureau. I guess it's true what they say--timing really is everything.

Go Fly A Kite

Saturday was another gorgeous beach day--no low cumulus clouds but some really high cirrus stratus as you can see in the background here (this was the extreme south end of Palm Beach Shores). Today I made some more lasagna and my condo smells incredible as a result. At least the shell of Sea Fever is still sitting there, racking up more fines every day. And the baby sea turtles have begun hatching; I saw one nest with eggshells and tracks from a couple more, but otherwise they remain elusive. Girls from the turtle place up and down the beach in their ATVs. The tide was extremely low in the afternoon and I was able to walk on some sandbars; it was pure and simple heaven, as the water was so warm. I remember thinking that if could choose a Groundhog Day, to relive over and over again for the rest of eternity, Saturday would have been it.

B. Careful of the HEAT!

This was the cautionary note that the lifeguards at Ocean Reef Park have inscribed in the message section of the data board that I noted early yesterday upon my arrival to the beach, just before eight o'clock. I also saw 'maybe tarpon and sharks' for Wednesday which had been erased for Thursday, so I'm inferring that maybe those large silver predators that I saw on Tuesday jumping out of the water going after the bait fish weren't sharks after all but tarpon. That could be, as tarpon are more apt to jump out of the water when stimulated than sharks.
But back to the heat--you can get heatstroke at the beach if you're not careful. In fact, as viewed from above, my travels there would seem to the casual observer as the proverbial quest for water, as I venture from fountain to fountain, some chilled and some not. As one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's characters once remarked, Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Freshwater, that is--not saltwater.
I drink tap water at the beach with absolute abandon, which is strange because at home it tastes funny--it has all this calcium in it which I don't like and makes ice look cloudy, so I indulge myself with bottled water for ice cubes and lemonade there. But at the beach for some reason I drink quite a bit.
Well, the main reason is I sweat. I drip all day long, even with a breeze. It's still hot but not as stifling as August was. The sun in Florida is very strong and if you're not used to it, it can be overwhelming.
Very clear blue skies and hardly any people greeted me at the beach yesterday. I observed a much larger but less well defined school of bait fish off the shore of Lost Tree Village, in North Palm Beach, which is south of Juno, on my way back but this time the show wasn't as good. A lot of individual fish jumping out of the water, being pursued by something presumably larger, but not as many of the spectacular mass flying fish and aggrieved predator thrashing in frenzied retaliation. The lot of them were moving south again but this time more slowly, as by the time I got back to my car, 4:15 p.m., the school hadn't made it down the coast yet to the guarded beaches.
I saw two baby sea turtles but sadly they were both dead. One had gotten caught a few hours earlier in some dried seaweed and had hundreds of fire ants all over him or her by the time I got there and the other had simply flipped over on his or her way down a hole and hadn't been able to turn back over. Such are the vagaries of survival in the world of baby sea turtles.
No pictures as there wasn't anything worth recording. Some honeys were about but none that had eyes for me without male escorts. Chicks that flirt with me in front of their boyfriends/husbands or otherwise smile or say hello give me pause. One woman more my age up around Juno did say "Hi" to me as we were both walking the same way--however, I threw her back. And I did have to take two 500 mg painkillers because my right foot and back were both acting up. But still--all in all, it was a beautiful day.

The First Blog

As you can see by my picture, I like to walk on the beach. This is my thing. I have other things that I do, but this is the primary one. I also have a camera and a tripod and I know how to use both, so I am armed and dangerous.
Why am I doing this? I'm glad I asked me that. I asked a question on a website of a literary agency where I am trying to solicit a reading of my latest completed novel, and to do that, I had to sign up here. I don't really expect anything to come of this, and even if nobody ever reads this but me, it'll be all right. Because right now I don't have much else to do but wait.
And go to the beach, of course. I just returned and I got some sun but no video of baby sea turtles. This is my latest chimera--the elusive baby sea turtle hatchlings as they make their way from the nest into the ocean.
I saw two baby sea turtles on Sunday morning but didn't have the camera with me. This is because I took the camera into the water with me on Saturday and I got knocked over by a large wave that threw me down into the surf. The force of this shock sent tiny grains of sand into the lens cover of my waterproof camera where they remained jammed, until I figured out on Monday how to get them out of there. Murphy's law again, but at least I figured this out on my own so I didn't have to send the camera back to Olympus for however long they would have taken to figure out what I did. Problem solved.
But back to the baby sea turtles on Sunday--even though I have no video to share, I did save one little sea turtle's life. He or she was being pecked by seagulls who had decided that this baby sea turtle constituted breakfast, or a reasonable equivalent thereof. I duly informed such seagulls that not only wasn't this little guy breakfast--all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding--neither was he brunch. The seagulls were not pleased at all, but this is by the way, life must go on and all that happy kind of malarkey. I report with pride that this baby sea turtle made it into the wide blue Atlantic Ocean in one piece and swimming like a champ.
But sadly I am forced to report that baby sea turtles that get into the water all by themselves have the odds stacked against them. Allow me by way of anecdotal illustration to explain why. The one video that I do have of a single baby sea turtle swimming out into the water was shot by me risking limb, if not life itself, to get it. After I followed the sea turtle out as far as I thought safe or prudent, I started swimming back into shore, as by this time, I was in water over my head. Since I can tread water with just my legs, this wasn't a problem.
The problem manifested itself in a fairly large manta ray that swam by me on my way out of the water. I did not panic as I am aware such predators will usually leave you alone as long as you leave them alone. But once on dry land, a three-foot shark appeared in the water, followed by another. Soon it became obvious that in calm, relatively clear water, even a single baby sea turtle can attract all types of attention. Which is why sea turtle nests have a tendency to hatch out all at once--which gives at least some of the little guys a fighting chance to get past all the dangers that lie in wait for them in the water--once they've gotten past all the predators that seek to eat them before they even make it into the ocean.
All of which goes to show you that life for sea turtles can be dangerous, as it can for human beings. There will be more on this and other subjects in the future, but right now some Parmesan steak fries are calling my name from the kitchen, and this is a siren song I cannot ignore. I have finally figured out how to post the sea turtle video taken on the morning with the sharks and rays that I mentioned--this was taken just before I saw the manta ray upon my exit from the ocean.