It was Monday again which meant new volunteer arriving, this time it was just 1 volunteer Hazel who was from the UK. She was a 25 year old science teacher from Brighton, when she arrived I helped her get her bags off the boat. Anyone would think she was here for 6 months her bag was huge and quite heavy. I went through welcome orientation and showed her round the village. As she had been travelling she was quite tired. Nick was back in the village as we had decided to close Tiga Ruang for a week. This was due to us as staff feeling the fisheries were getting complacent of us being there. We had told them about poachers and they carried on sleeping. They were still putting the eggs in the hatchery and monitoring nests for hatchlings but after losing our data loggers and not explaining how they got lost we felt it best to leave for a bit. They also weren't patrolling other beaches as often and spending a lot of time at our camp. It is a shame as I know a lot of our volunteers love it at Tiga Ruang and most of the volunteers said it was the best part. So in the morning the others went on survey and Nick was doing data analysis with Nadia. In the afternoon I went on survey with Nadia as Ramona didn't think Nick could go in the Kayak. There had been an incident earlier on in the season with Nick and the Kayak so I was down for surveys all week. It was a successful survey we saw 5 turtles, one of them was P244F a new turtle for this year discovered in April only seen 5 times all season.
Tuesday I was similar to Monday I went on Survey this time with Hazel, Chloe and Cassandra. I hadn't spent much time with Chloe and Cassandra last week so was looking forward to getting to know them. We only saw 3 turtles on our survey, the highlight of the survey was when we found Hope in the shallow waters. She is easily identifiable as she has a shark bite in her right flipper.
Anyway, Hope was very crowded by tourists so I went to take photos of her. As there was a lot of tourists I asked Chloe to hold the Kayak. I got the photos of both sides of the face as well as the shot above of the flipper and when I surfaced I heard Chloe shouting "Give her space she needs to breathe, you are like flies!". She was very angry screaming to stop tourists getting to close to the turtle, which is completely understandable as tourists do not respect the turtles space especially when they are surfacing. However, when I saw Chloe there was no Kayak near her, she had let it go and the Kayak had got taken almost to shore so I had to swim to it before it got any further into the shore. We got back and had lunch and did data analysis. In the evening me Chloe and Hazel were meant to be cooking however we didn't have much in the cupboards or fridge. We had some pasta, a few veggies and sauce so decided to attempt to make something with that. We were going to go shopping at 6:30pm so we had food the rest of the week but as we were about to go it started storming badly. It hadn't been that long since Dan and the others came back from survey and Dan was still in his swim shorts waiting for the shower. He offered to go down in the rain as he needed a shower anyway. As it was my responsibility to do dinner and get shopping I couldn't let him suffer on his own so I put my swim shorts on and joined him. The rain was relentless and we got soaked instantly, we saw this as an opportunity to have some poses in the rain.
We got the shopping and then I went back and cooked, I enjoy cooking but I'm not used to cooking for so many people as I much prefer cooking for myself. Its been a good experience though and everyone has liked everything I've cooked so far. Dan goes on Visa Run tomorrow, going to be weird when he goes.
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