Everyone has those summer memories at the beach. Lying out in the sun, taking relaxing walks on the shore, eating mouthfuls of seafood, or simply lounging in a hammock with a good book. With friends or family those memories are unforgettable. Sure, I have those memories at the beach, but mine hold a lot more within them.
I am always encouraged by my family to follow my passions (hoping to find my lifelong passion). I have had different passions throughout my life but I have had one that stayed quietly on the shorelines for quite some time, until this summer.
I am a Class A nerd when it comes to science, especially marine biology and sea turtles. Whenever I see something with marine biology on it, my nerdy self is drawn. That’s what happened when I was browsing the web last year and an ad for a “Sea Turtle Camp” popped up. Reading the requirements for this camp was nothing compared to what we were going to be doing during the 10 full days I was going to be there. I was going to be interacting with REAL rescued sea turtles. My favorite animal made this camp more of a dream than a reality.
Every day I went to the sea turtle hospital. Instead of someone else feeding the sea turtles, I threw them the squid to eat. Instead of watching someone scrub a sea turtle’s shell, I scrubbed its shell, wiped its flippers and cleaned its bellies. Instead of listening to someone ramble about them, I climbed into the tank with them. I was hand in flipper, with my favorite animal.
Each sea turtle had his or her own personality. My favorite sea turtle, May, who was an average sized, nine-year-old loggerhead weighing about 300 pounds and about five and a half feet from the top of her head to the tip of her tail, always showed her excitement by flapping her flippers as I stepped into her tank every morning. May learned from her stay at the hospital that humans are there to help and care for her, not to harm. She would scoot as close as she could to me, put her head on my knee and close her eyes, asking for her head to be rubbed.
I became May’s caretaker for the 10 days at the hospital, and she and I bonded more every day. Each morning I stepped into
the tank with May, who gave me a warm welcome; she seemed to know I was there to help. The flapping of her flippers and the excitement that she portrayed in her eyes made me more passionate than ever about the fate of sea turtles.
We would always go to the sea turtle hospital (where the sea turtles were held), but we would do different activities involving them too. We released a young sea turtle back to the ocean, surrounding it with our positive energy on the shore praying for a safe journey. We were even woken up in the middle of the night sprinting to the shoreline dropping down into the sand and military crawling to a safe distance to observe a mother sea turtle lay her eggs in the dunes and inch back into the sea.
We didn’t only work with sea turtles. We learned how to surf, paddle-boarded to the only coconut tree in North Carolina, hiked through salt marshes, and even went behind the scenes at the aquarium in Wilmington.
At the end of each day, I was run down and exhausted. Every day was filled from sunrise to sunset with a booked to-do list. Two days felt like five and five days felt like two weeks.
Helping an endangered species thrive is something that I feel will make a positive impact on the world and I want to be a part of it. Those 10 days spent with May helped me realize that this wasn’t just the way I wanted to spend my summer, this was the way I wanted to spend my life.
-By Rachel Boyle