Turtle Island Park
5.30pm
5.35pm
6.15pm
9.30pm
9.35pm
9.45pm
Turtle tracks at dawn the next day
Day 6 Diary by Hamish Sandison
Day 6 18th July – Turtle Island Diary by Hamish Sandison
The day started in a rather unspectacular fashion to the noise of Tom Mitchell screaming ‘Hamish there’s a Moon Rat, watch out’. This of course was a lie, and I had grown used to these sorts of comments from Tom over the past week. I wasn’t in the greatest of moods due to the fact that i had spent the previous night in a dorm of 8 trying to get to sleep. The journey to Sandakan was relatively short and lasted no longer than 40 minutes, in which I read my book. I have never been much of a reader but for some reason I was rather obsessed with my current book which I had only started two days previous and was already 250 pages through. Once we arrived at the port, which wasn’t the cleanest place I had ever been, we sat and waited patiently for the boat which promptly arrived. We split into two boats, a girl boat and a lad boat. The journey proved uneventful with majority of people falling asleep. We did stop off for a photo opportunity to see how the local fishermen caught anchovies. We arrive at Turtle Island an hour after setting off and spent the next hour settling down in our rooms.
After lunch we were giving until 5 30 to relax and go to the beach. This was our first extended period of free time on the trip so far and we made sure not to put it to waste. We all rushed to the beach and relaxed. A fair few number opted to hire our some snorkelling gear and went out to sea to explore the choral. I too had an opportunity to see the fish in action was rather put off after seeing people returning to the beach with jelly fish stings. The wild life in the choral was very diverse though, with many crabs proving a source of entertainment for the younger people in the group. After the beach we all felt rather tired and went back to our rooms to clean up which in the end proved impossible, the showers we all salt water! The next part of the day was why we came to Turtle Island in the first place. We were waiting outside the canteen when Rupert called to us alerting us to come and see what we had found. Rupert had stumbled across a turtle nest in which more than 60 baby turtles were trying to make their way to the surface. All of us crowded round in excitement and each collected a few turtles and rushed to the beach and had turtle races, this was by far up there with one of the most amazing experiences I had experienced.
Once supper had concluded we were shown upstairs to an information room which told us all about the information of the program on the island. We saw real turtle skeletons and learnt all about the current laws regarding Turtle protection. Next we moved into the video room and watched a brief video on the life cycle of the turtles in Malaysia. Then we waited.
We had been sitting and waiting for over an hour, waiting for the warden to give us the signal. We had been sitting in darkness and in the silence so as not to scare off the mother turtles. Then we got the call and Lee quickly told us to get up and run over to a place where a turtle had begun to lay her eggs. It was a rather surreal experience, only the back of the turtle was lit up and what we saw was rather perplexing, it appeared that the turtles were laying ping pong balls. Once the turtle had finished the warden counted the eggs which added up to 92 eggs. We then briefly had a tour of the hatchery and then once again headed back to the beach to release some more baby turtle. It had been the longest and most tiring day of the trip so far and wasn’t made any easier by the fact that we were getting a wake- up call at 5 30 am the next morning. With this information in our heads we went straight to sleep.
‘Places like these represent a healthy future for all of us and show it is not too late to stop the crisis of species loss’
