North Australian FISH FINDER TM forums

This is a little video of last weekends trip to bare sand island. We have spent many of fruitless hours walking beaches looking for nesting or hatching turtles.
We got spoilt this time. We would have seen around 10 nest over the 2 nights and was still in bed before 10 each night.
There was a researcher (mick, champion fella) out on the island who become our own personal tour guild, answering the endless questions from the kids... (and Keri and i).
He even let the kids help him with his research, writing down sizes, checking hatched nest and documenting how many eggs hatch, how many didn’t. Collecting and of the slow hatching to release that night so the birds didn’t pick them off.
Fishing was oddly quite, but got a good mixed bag.
Seen a pod of dolphins (quite possibly were false killer wales) swim right up to the boat.
And the small island full of birds was cool too.
Was a very special weekend.




https://youtu.be/QaKaNfR8Ilw

Quiet fishing mickkkk, haha. Half your luck.

Great video - special weekend in a special place.

Very special indeed , what a great experience for the kids ,,,

I just let our grandkids see this ,,, yep, now I have to plan a trip .

I have camped there about 20 years ago , do you need any sort of permit these days ?

Cheers

https://www.nlc.org.au/uploads/pdfs/180 ... Map-A3.pdf

All good to camp there.
No fires, which I normally hate, but you are pretty busy walking the beaches at night and then in bed so it’s not soo bad.
Take head lights with red light. When the turtles are coming up the beach and digging their body hole they can be spooked easily with white light. Once they are digging their chamber and laying they go in a trance and can then use white light. When they head back down to the beach go to red light as the turtle will go towards the white light. Same with the hatchlings, they go towards the lights, you can guide them down to the water with them.
Apparently the turtles can bite, so keep away from the bitie end. Once they are laying or heading back to water you can touch them from behind.
Probably only 2 or 3 sets of spring tides till they finish laying. They will continue to hatch for another 50 days after that.
You need a permit to handle the hatchlings, there was a researcher on the island who let the kids help him release ones he had collected from the morning before. We also seen them hatching and walking down the beach naturally.

https://nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_fil ... elines.pdf
This is a good bit of info too.

Wow, well worth it then! Thanks for the info!

Thanks for the extra info mickkk