The Old Turtles visit – Andrew and Justine we miss you already!

Message from the new turtles:

Last week we had a visit from the old turtles Andrew and Justine. Finally we got to meet the people who we only knew from pictures on Facebook, the people behind the stories. We got first hand details of all their crazy, wild, and funny adventures everyone always seemed to be telling. It also felt good to have someone that could understand, relate and give us some smart suggestions from their past experiences. We heard about Farquhar experiences and of all the flat tires they had had. We spent some time at 3Mile beach, where we naturally got bogged in the sand with a car unable to go in reverse. Even Andrew, during his short time here, got a flat tire in the GTCP project vehicle. Gnaraloo just wouldn’t be the same without these experiences.

During their stay, the old turtles were trained to be trainers so maybe they will come back one day to train the future turtle generations, here in Gnaraloo.

It was definitely hard to say goodbye, but we are sure we will hear from them in the near future. Good luck old turtles!

Cheers, Einat Daniel

Message from the old turtles:

Last week Justine and I were fortunate enough to be invited back to Gnaraloo to meet the season 2013/14 turtles and to complete the “Train the trainer” program. After 16 hours we finally arrived at Gnaraloo and had to wait until the next morning to meet this year’s group of adventurous turtles. Compared to our old team composed entirely of West Australians, this year the team is quite multicultural. Whether it was learning about the tradition of Hanukkah with Einat, or convincing Nora that “Land down under” was the official national anthem of Australia, it was great to learn about other cultures, and to teach them about ours.

On the second night we were treated to a BBQ down at the turtle HQ (old homestead) with station staff and woofers, trading stories and discussing the season to come. The next few days were spent either relaxing, telling stories about our Gnaraloo experiences and constantly distracting the new turtles from their work with daily invitations to head down to the beach. After joining in with a few surveys to refresh ourselves with turtle tracking, we were ready to start our 2 day training with Casey. The turtles were quite active during the nights over our training period so we were fortunate to have plenty of turtle tracks and activities to work with. On the first day of training, Casey went through all the knowledge required for turtle track monitoring pretending that we were new volunteers.

On the second day, Justine and I took the reins and it was our turn to train Casey. We both individually had a one on one session with Casey where all of our turtle knowledge came flooding back with information and fun facts about turtles spilling out of our mouths. We both passed with flying colours, the first of what we hope are many Gnaraloo turtle track trainers.

It was a pleasure to visit Gnaraloo again after a 9 month break and we both look forward to visiting again in the near future, whether it will be for a holiday or to put our new Gnaraloo turtle track training skills to work!

Best of luck for the rest of the season new turtles!

Andrew and Justine