Day 9 - Sulphur Spring and Night Survey

Yesterday morning after we were all awake Tom, Mandy, Poppy, Talitha and I walked to one of the Sulphur Springs about 20mins away from the house. We took a short cut Tom had discovered through a field that had loads of goats 🐐! One of them was panting like crazy so Tom gave it his water and we untied it and moved it to an area of more grass to feed on. Once we arrived at the spring we saw all the Sulphur pools and people sitting around them. We removed our clothes so we were in our swimming costumes and one of the locals working covered us all in natural mud from the springs. The mud was green and the Sulphur didn’t smell like rotten egg but like sheep poo 💩. We said we looked like shrek and Fiona at their swamp! Once we were all covered in mud we had to sit in the sun and let it dry. After that the same guy rubbed the dry mud off us, exfoliating our skin so we were left in a powdery green state. We then entered the largest of the Sulphur pools. The pools are naturally warm from the volcanic spring and the bottom of the pools was all squishy like swamp mud which poppy and I didn’t like much. We met a guy called Francois who is actually English and lives near London. He told us he is an Actor and he films at Warner bros studios, apparently was recently in the new Mary poplins returns and is filming a new marvel film called Morbius? Something like that, he also mentioned Star Wars as well but we never asked him who he plays and we can’t find him online. He owns a house over here though and invited us for a bbq at his sometime this week so we might see him and his friend Sara again. Tom met him the other day so it was funny they bumped into each other again yesterday.

When we were in the Sulphur pool we had to rub off all the mud to stop ourselves staying green. there were also areas bubbling but I didn’t like the feeling, Talitha described it like popping candy but   It felt like something was farting underwater to me! After the first pool we skipped the second one and went straight to the sea water where the guy poured sea water on us to rinse us off. They then rubbed cocoa butter on us and we smelt like chocolate 🍫 . After we had dried we clothed and walked back to the house 🏠. I had some lunch and then read for part of the afternoon, now on the fifth book. Talitha and Tom made a curry for dinner 🥘 before we got ready for Night Survey.

Kester, Steve, Mandy, Poppy and I were on Night Survey last night. Kester, Mandy and I went out on the first run and released some hatchlings we had brought back the day before. I’d always thought hatchlings instinct was quite strong and that they move quickly and head towards the sea unless there’s white light confusing them but that is not the case! It might just be that we only ever see the last few that are a bit diddly and prone to predation but they seem to move very slowly and walk around in circles. I guided a few with my red light and even those that got to the sea, they don’t just crawl into the sea and start swimming, the wave takes them and they roll about in the sand getting dragged all over and more often than not the wave doesn’t even successfully take them. And then they don’t even carry on towards the sea. They start crawling back the wrong way, it took ages for me to convince two of them to go back the other way and eventually they were swept into the sea successfully! Once all 5 were in the sea we carried on our patrol.

We saw two females nesting during the run, both nested successfully without needing to relocate the eggs. Poppy and Steve saw one turtle and had to relocate the eggs. We didn’t see anymore for the rest of the evening. One of the turtles was from Trinidad! 🇹🇹 We could tell from her flipper tags, she’d been tagged with a Trinidad tag which start with T and on the back say TNT whereas the Grenada turtles start with WC.