Belimbing Series:Permission
After a long journey and a long boat ride during which most people take a snooze, we arrived at the village of Saubebah at the western end of Jamursba-Medi beach.
I was on the old stomping grounds of Satish Bhaskar, Chris Starbird, Martha Suarez…
Before starting my project, I had to first get permission from the Saubebah village Chief and the villagers to work on their beach; Bas Wurlianty from the WWF-Indonesia office in Sorong (in the red shirt) 
introduced me to the village and translated my request for permission.
The village decides what can and cannot be done on their nesting beach whether it be flipper tagging, PIT tagging, satellite telemetry or my hatching success experiments…..Incidentally, the village does not allow flipper tagging on this beach because they believe that the drop in leatherback nesting numbers has been caused by a researcher who flipper tagged in the 1980s and then lured their leatherbacks with a huge magnet to his country….
TO BE CONTINUED...