Turtle Release in Sayulita, 🇲🇽 - a good cause and fun experience! 🐢

Sayulita is a gorgeous and laid back beach town in Mexico, known for it’s good surfing and “good vibes”. It is so picturesque: look towards the beach and you see the beautiful waves, look around the other way and you see the wonderful palm tree forest.

When we were taking a stroll along the beach, we stumbled upon a Sea Turtle Release ‘shack’ that releases baby turtles most nights at 6 pm. The turtle release was free/ ‘donations appreciated’ or you can buy a nest of eggs for a 25 dollars donation (you get 20+ baby turtles to release). The people that help there are really nice and helpful. Not only were they helping sea turtles, but they were all volunteers.

The reason they look for eggs and incubate them is to safe turtles from animals (raccoons, crabs and other animals love feasting on eggs) and also human poachers (It is a very nutritional egg that are given to kids). The efforts by these volunteers have saved many turtles and will help save the olive ridley sea turtle, which is facing high risk of extinction in the wild.

These nice people invited us to help look for sea turtle eggs at 6 am. And just like that ~ a few days later ~ we were up at the crack of dawn to “hunt” for eggs…

We walked down to the beach and pretty soon we found tracks that indicated that a sea turtle had been there. (they normally come up the beach to lay eggs between 1 - 4 am) We followed the tracks and found a nest. We dug about 2 feet and found 118 eggs. The eggs were perfectly round and opaque. The eggs were fragile and when you touch an egg, there would be a little indent the size of your finger. The eggs were about the size of ping pong balls.

A bit farther down the beach, we saw some different tracks. We followed them and found an empty nest. Then we saw a little baby sea turtle! The eggs inside the nest had hatched and the baby sea turtles had gone into the ocean. The baby sea turtle that we had found, was the last of the nest. We brought him to the ocean and watched him swim away.

They rely on volunteer work and donations (and trust us, these are genuine and hardworking people!), so if you can: Paypal: sayulitaturtlecamp@gmail.com

It was a really fun and unique experience.