A few summers back Amanda and Alex flew to Oahu to visit us. We hiked trails, body-surfed waves, explored the North Shore eating shave ice along the way, but one of the most amazing moments was when a green sea turtle popped his head up a few feet from us swimming in waters of Kailua and allowed us to catch up with him and cruise a while. Mike actually got right up along the turtle as he came up for air. He turned his head and looked Mike straight in the eyes before diving down again to feed on the sea grass below. We followed that turtle above and below the waters for at least 20 minutes before he headed out to sea and so began my deep love for these gentle creatures.

Here in Cyprus we have the 5th largest sea nesting sites in the Mediterranean and are the host to not one - but two types of turtles each year - the green sea turtle and the loggerhead. They started arriving in early June to lay their eggs and the night before Tara left we spent a good part of unusually warm summer night on the beach waiting for a mama to come and lay her babes. At this point of the season there were already protected turtle nests lining the beach as far as the eye could see. We didn't have any sitings that evening, although one set of tracks were found on the beach a little west of us, but it looked as though she had returned to sea maybe to return the following evening when she had found just the right spot. The volunteers who spend the summer there did have a bucket of hatchlings they had plucked from a rescued nest earlier in the day and we did get to see these teeny little babies get lined upon the waters edge to follow their ancestral instincts and head out to sea. Some babies ran and some needed a few pointers in the right direction, and finally, one by one, the sea lapped them up to disappear into the dark waters of the night and we cheered over and over as each one headed out on their own journey as if they were our own.