Our private beach
Sometime after June 9th 2016 (I can no longer keep track of the day of the week)
It’s time to talk about our beach. I’ve already described the house and the park-like gardens. I’ve also said that the beach is about fifty feet from the base of our front steps.
We go down to the beach nearly every day. Dawn takes the dogs on walks once or twice a day and sometimes she even pries me away from my computer to join her.
We have four hundred and fifty feet of beach front on our lot. (The whole lot is thirteen acres) The beach itself is several miles long and totally private. To the west is a head land and point that blocks further passage on the beach. To the east another points marks the end of the beach. We often skinny dip here because there are no other people around
We have light tan colored sand. Not like the white sandy beaches I was used to from Hawaii or Mexico. The sand is fine and as you walk along the beach, you sink in about ankle deep. Near the water, where it is wet, you sink in even further.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect it’s because the coral here is the same light tan color.
I know that in Hawaii, the white sand is because the fish eat the coral and pass the sand. The coral there is white.
The jungle comes right down to the beach. Palms of all kinds, teak, sea grape and mahogany trees line the coastline with about twenty or thirty feet of beach between them and the ocean. There is a little drift wood, but nothing like we’re used to in the Pacific Northwest.
Tides this close to the equator are not much to talk about, maybe two or three feet. However, we are facing the open Caribbean Sea, so we get waves crashing ashore. Sometimes the sea is calm and you can easily walk out until you can’t touch bottom. Sometimes the sea is angry and you have to dive into the waves to get off the beach. The sound of the surf crashing on the shore is a constant. There is no silence in this jungle. At night, we watch a DVD on the TV and huddle close to hear the sound track over the roar of the breakers. Sometimes I think it’s going to drive me crazy, sometimes I don’t even notice it. The other day I was driving into town and just stopped on the road and turned off the engine in the middle of the jungle to hear some quiet.
Turtle tracks on the beach
Several species of turtles nest on our beach. First there are the leatherbacks, then the hawksbills, the green and loggerheads. The females take turns coming ashore to lay their eggs with the leatherbacks coming in first, then the green etc.
Dawn and Heidi discovered several turtle nests on the beach and Joyce carefully records their coming and going. The mama turtle leaves the sea under the full moon with the highest tides and climbs up the beach to lay her eggs in a nest above the high water mark then returns to the sea. The eggs are warmed by the sun and eventually hatch at the same time. A single turtle may lay as many as one hundred and sixty eggs. Several females will lay their eggs in close by locations so that when thousands of baby turtles hatch, some of them have a chance of making it to the sea.
Naturally, predators are waiting for the eggs to hatch. Some even eat the eggs. The worst of the bunch is a species called homo sapiens. We have poachers here. Even though the turtles are protected by law, there is no police presence to guard them. The honest people don’t eat them and the dishonest ones ignore the law.
These people have been eating turtles and their eggs since time began. Every year the turtles return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. The cycle continued. Then modern man came along.
First it was the pirates, whalers and explorers. Turtles were great sources of protein and taste a lot like pork. The shells were prized for making jewelry.
Soon, a worse type of pirate hounded the turtles. The capitalists organized expeditions to hunt the creatures and finally, their factories and ships produced so much pollution that their feeding grounds became deserts.
Now the turtles hang on by their flippers. The natives here don’t seem to understand the concept of yesterday and tomorrow. They only live in today. Today, there are plentiful turtles on their beaches so they hunt them, not realizing that they are on the brink of extinction around the world.
One day, Heidi was out walking when two men came down our beach. One had a machete and the other a bundle of sticks.
“What are you doing here?” Heidi asked.
“Oh, we’re from the government. We’re surveying the turtles. We find the nests and mark them, then when the turtles hatch, we count them.”
Seemed harmless enough. Until we told Gundela about it.
“Poachers!” she screamed. “Those sons of bitches are marking the nests so they can come back and steal the eggs.”
Sure enough the next morning, the nests had been dug up and a few broken turtle eggs littered the beach.
Heidi and Dawn now went to Def-Con 2. Dawn built a scarecrow and asked me to tie a hangman’s noose for her. She hung the scarecrow above the turtle nests and lighted a tiki-torch.
Heidi was swimming when two guys were marking turtle nests. She confronted them and told them to leave. Remember, the average Panamanian man is about five foot six. Heidi came out of the water in her bikini looking like Ursala Andress in Doctor No. It was this Valkyrie who is a martial arts expert and two little brown men. They decided that discretion is the better part of valor and cleared out.
Turtle nest on our beach
Another day, Dawn was walking along the beach when two pangas showed up with two men apiece in them. She ran back to the house and got Wes’s BB gun. I gotta tell you, this BB gun is so realistic looking that if you pointed it at a cop, he’d shoot you.
It looks like a big, bad automatic pistol.
With her weapon in hand, she returned to the beach where the pangas were approaching the shore. She aimed the gun at them and they did a quick one-eighty. Then she stayed, stuck the gun in her waistband and played with the dogs until they lost interest and left.
All of this was before we learned that the poachers in the pangas carry guns. I guess they didn’t want to get into a gun fight over a bunch of eggs.
On Sunday, Jim and Frances invited us up to the tree house for a good ole Texas-style barbeque. We call it the tree house because the lower floor is a kitchen, dining area and lounge. It reminds me of a Key West bar. In the center of the big room is a large tree. Upon careful inspection, I could tell that the tree didn’t grow there. A group of Boy Scouts built the house as part of a tree house competition. They brought the tree in to lend style to the house, but we now call it the tree house. Looking up at the house from the beach, it truly looks like a modern tree house, overhanging the steep hill.
Jim and Frances rent out the house on AirBNB.
The driveway down to their house reminds me of a carnival ride. It is barely wide enough for one vehicle. The forest reaches out and grabs at you as you drive down. It is steep and is just ruts in the dirt. When it rains, the footing is so bad that you have to have 4-wheel drive to get down.
While we were lounging around, watching Frances cook, waiting for the other guests to arrive, Jim and Dawn took the dogs for a walk. They have a pack of four or five dogs, I can never tell because they’re constantly moving around and all look alike. Add our two dogs and you have my worst nightmare.
Peanut sniffs out a turtle nest
They had only been gone for a few minutes when Jim came huffing back up to the house.
“All hands on deck. I need help freeing a stranded turtle.”
I pulled on my sandals and headed down to the beach. Frances stopped to grab a camera.
The path to the beach was no better than their driveway. I clung to vines and small palm trees as I edged my way along small cliffs until I finally arrived at the scene of the crime.
Dawn was standing down in a cluster of green rocks with driftwood piled on them.
“Where’s the turtle?” I asked.
“Right there.” Dawn pointed.
I didn’t see no stinkin’ turtle. I stepped down into the rocks to get a closer look.
“Watch out!” she shouted. “You’re going to step on the turtle.”
Sure enough, if I looked carefully, I could see that one of the big rocks was indeed a hawksbill turtle. She was wedged between two rocks that were covered with driftwood to a height of about three feet. No way was she going to climb over that.
Not only that, she couldn’t turn around. Apparently turtles can’t back up, so she was stuck.
She was about three feet long and maybe two and a half feet across. When we lifted her, I guessed that she weighed about two hundred pounds.
Jim and Frances arrived. There wasn’t room for all of us to work around the turtle so Frances chronicled the event on her camera. You can see the video on my home page.
Jim took one side of the big beast, I took the other and Dawn lifted her tail end. We tried to lift her and she panicked. She tried to crawl forward and jammed my hand against a rock. It hurt. Come to think of it, it still does. It swelled up like a golf ball, a purple golf ball that is. But not until after we rescued her.
She had wedged herself so far forward under the driftwood that we couldn’t lift her. Jim and I pulled her back into the clear, then we lifted the squirming, fighting reptile up to the first rock. She wanted out of there. She tried to get over the driftwood, to no avail.
“Lift, NOW!” Jim yelled.
I got a handhold and between the two of us, we got her up on the driftwood. As soon as her center of gravity was over the log, she slipped from our hands, down the rocks and into the sea. We stood and watched to make sure she made it, but never saw her again. She must have swum out into her home under water.
We all felt very full of ourselves, saving this magnificent animal. No single person could have lifted and moved her. But as a team, we did it.
Peanut waits for turtles to come ashore
Yesterday, Dawn saved a baby turtle. She was walking on the beach with Peanut and Little Bit when Peanut smelled something under the sand. She started digging and before long, came out of the hole with a small turtle in her mouth. Peanut trotted over to Dawn and dropped the turtle.
Dawn had been told that you don’t pick up baby turtles. We later found out that the babies need to walk in the sand so they memorize their beach. The turtles always return to the beach where they were born. Dawn did as told, lifted the turtle and carried him into the water. She let him go and watched him swim away.
Afterwards, she looked in the hole Peanut had dug. At the bottom she found the shell with a hole in it where the turtle had hatched.
I mentioned earlier that when the baby turtles hatch, they make a mad dash for the sea to escape predators. Gulls, pelicans and other sea birds love to feast on baby turtles. Small mammals, snakes, etc. like to join the fiesta.
The egg laying season is in full swing. For the last couple of days, as we approach the full moon, we’re seeing all kinds of turtle tracks in the sand and nests on our beach.
Turtle tracks look like tractor tire tracks. There is the center area where the sand is flattened by the turtle’s shell. Then, outside of the shell track, are the tracks left by their flippers as they propel themselves forward. The track ends where they decide to build their nests, then there is another set of tracks where they make their way back to the sea.
The nests are depressions about four feet in diameter in the sand where the mama lays her eggs. Then she covers them and heads back to the open ocean, never to see her offspring again.
Yesterday, Dawn was totally excited. We had a set of turtle tracks leading up to the path where we walk down to the sea. I couldn’t find any trace of a nest, so we decided that this must be a false nest.
The mama turtles sometimes come up onto the beach and leave their tracks to confuse predators. Then they go back into the water and come ashore again in another place to lay their eggs.
This morning we had a couple of sets of tracks right in front of the house. There is a nest in our path that leads down to the beach. Dawn can’t wait for the eggs to hatch and see the babies head for the sea.
Last night, since it was one day before the full moon, we took flash lights and walked down to the beach to watch for turtles coming ashore. We waited too long. We saw a couple of turtle tracks and new nests, but it was about an hour after high tide. I didn’t realize that turtles could read tide charts. Apparently they come ashore when the tide is at its highest so that they can plant their eggs high above the high-water mark.
I’m sure we’ll have more turtle adventures as the months pass by, but that’s it for now.
Turtles aren’t the only wild life here. Stay tuned, on my next blog I’ll tell you how to avoid having shit flung at you by a howler monkey.
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