2006/2007 Patrol Leaders: Dave, Joey, Marc and Albert. Leading a successful season.

Many of our nests have hatched with success rates above 90%.

We ran seminars in 7 schools handing out books to every student along with donated art supplies and other fun stuff. Many students took additional books to take home to sibling and parents.

We added “Turtle Man to help with the presentations and he went off with a hit. Many costal communities from little kids to hard core poachers are talking about the human size turtle that hands out coloring books, chicken eggs and candy while talking about sea turtle conservation.

We delivered circle hooks from NOAA -- to Randall Arauz for an experimental fishery that could save thousands of turtles at sea.

We patrolled every night for almost six months and together have managed to send thousands of baby turtles to sea.

This season we operated very efficiently and had many more nests. However, we still lost about 20% of the nests to poachers, they are hard cases.

Update -- 06/07 season.

  The hooks have had some good results after two observed experiments, it looks good for the turtles if prelimenary reports are correct. We also had 0 dead Sea Turtles on the beach during the 06/07 season, down from 13 the previous year. Thanx to NOAA -- Endangered Resources, they are finding ways to protect our precious Marine Turtles from industrial fishing. Three cheers mate!

  So our technical capabilities were enhanced with the help of Clatsop Comminity College this season in a dramatic way. Craig Lee , Tyler Laird, and Emma Carpenter did a 6 week internship bringing GPS technology on loan from the college and also a metal detector to experiment with our new nest locating strategy. Craig is developing a computer program along with other STF team members that will give us an Aerial View GPS Nest and Data Monitoring System. Dr. Micheal Bunch has been a key element in co-ordinating our efforts with Clatsop Community College to develop a great hands-on field course available to our Oregon students.

  Randall Arauz -- our mentor has discovered a new species of shark in Costa Rica that had previously been mis-identified, now with DNA technology he was able to identify the mistake. Randall has also headed up the experimental circle hook fishery to find a possible answer to the Long-line/Turtle conflict.

  Mistral Dobson came out from Australia and did tremendous work with " Team Alpha", we had the advantage of doing in-depth comparisons of the Eastern and Western Chelonia Mydas. The differences were marked, and we were very fortunate to have her on the team -- for free.

  We had about a $20,000 dollar budget in 06/07 -- we climbed mountains. All the school seminars in Cosa Rica, and Oregon had priceless impact alone. And the local community of Los Pargos which has been surviving on the eggs for generations prospered. Our project and the volunteers that showed up to do field work spent about $30,000 in the community.That is compared with $1000 for the eggs at local prices. The locals were asking me how much the project spent because they are seeing that turtles are worth alot more alive than dead --- and that was one of our original goals. It,s working folks, the people get to see our In-Situ nest hatches every night now ( 2-3 per night at peak) and most of them have never seen this before because all the eggs were gone, they are seeing what they have been missing now.

  Last season was almost unbelievable but we had a professional documentarist that caught most of the project on film, so STF  2 will be out of the editing room soon with a great insight into the progress we have made on Punta Pargos. I have just flat out been to swamped to spend time up-dateing the web-site but there is more to the story, and that $20,000 went a long long way to improving the chances for survival of our critically endangered Eastern Chelonia Mydas.

  Thanks for the support of everyone who helped -- I am going to post a list of everyones name soon.

  Marc