Bubbles in the Bathtub

We had no luck the first night after our satellite tags showed up. A turtle did nest, but there was a huge storm in the middle of the night and the beach patrol did not find the nest until morning.

So we broke out the big guns last night. Wendy settled down with a book that had only a few pages left and the rest of us started to watch a movie. It didn't take long before we got a call from the Conservancy that they had found a turtle.

It was a good ways up the beach, about 10 miles, near Fort Fisher, North Carolina, not actually on Bald Head Island. So we had to take an ATV and only a couple of us would fit. So Wendy and myself went and Matthew stayed behind.

By the time we arrived the conservancy interns had already put a box around the turtle and cleaned the barnacles off the carapace.

Everyone helped prep the turtle the rest of the way: sanding down the area where the tag was to be attached; cleaning the area with a bit of acetone; then put down a layer of Power-Fast epoxy and placed the tag, a Kiwisat 101, in the epoxy.

The epoxy was a little runnier than we are used to, and we had to give it extra time to harden. We put on a total of three layers of epoxy. Once the last layer had mostly hardened, we applied marine anti-fouling paint to half of the attachment area. We are hoping that this turtle will re-nest this season and we will be able to get a follow-up photo to see if the anti-fouling paint helps reduce bio-fouling (barnacles, algae, etc). Growth on and around the tag can cover the salt water switch and prevent the satellite tag from transmitting when it is at the surface. We are hoping to find a way to slow down the accumulation of epibionts and hopefully get a little more time out of the tags.

Once the paint was dry enough that it did not come off when touched, we lifted the boards and off she went!!!

The turtle track is already online and you can follow her progress here.

I also made an audio recording of the proceedings which will hopefully go online next week. There is no way I am going to upload it (24+ MB) from the dial-up connection I have here.

Audio Blog (8.2 MB mp3 file)