Have you ever just been at the right place at the right time, the perfect time to witness something truly amazing? Well, wait til you hear about our latest, greatest adventure!
Meet "Red" Berger, pictured above with Danielle. She and her husband Tom just happen to be on the boat next to us in Bonaire. They are in their fifth year cruising aboard Katana, a steel-hulled Endurance 44 ketch. She volunteers three days a week at STCB, Sea Turtle Conservation Bonaire, and invited us to tag along one day.
Meet "Red" Berger, pictured above with Danielle. She and her husband Tom just happen to be on the boat next to us in Bonaire. They are in their fifth year cruising aboard Katana, a steel-hulled Endurance 44 ketch. She volunteers three days a week at STCB, Sea Turtle Conservation Bonaire, and invited us to tag along one day.
Meet STCB associate Funchi Egbreghts, a native of Bonaire. He's the nesting expert, and takes volunteers along to check Bonaire's west coast and the offshore island of Klein Bonaire for signs of nesting activities. When a new nest is discovered, it is flagged with a blue marker and logged into the records. The nest he's checking above should hatch very soon.
A closer look at the top egg. It takes about 60 days to hatch.
This one is a dud - unfertilized.
The next nest has a big surprise in store; it hatched last night, 4 days early! Funchi and "Red" start digging. They collect all the empty eggshells and determine that about 110 hatchlings made it out of the nest under the light of the moon.
It's normal for a few babies to get trapped in the nest, which can be about 2 feet deep. As the little guys start hatching, they climb up on top of each other. There's always a few who are too deep and too tired to make it out. Here's when the fun starts. "Red" finds the first two hatchlings and hands them out to Funchi.
"Red" hands the next two to Danielle.
And the next one! They are baby hawksbill turtles.
First he gets a bath to wash some of the sand off. Then he's placed on the beach to insure he imprints with the place of his birth. If he's a she, she will come back one day and lay her nests on this same beach.
Then they warm up in the sunshine and start to move around, slowly. It's pretty common to find 3 to 5 turtles left behind in the nest...
...but this nest had around 30 little ones that wouldn't have made it without the help of STCB, and dedicated volunteers like "Red".
They head into the water, and tumble back and forth in the waves for a minute or so.
Sometimes the weaker ones are kept a few days until they are strong enough to swim on their own.
Now this is what I call Marine Biology! 
Our group looks on - Good Luck, Little Turtles!
Sea Ya! Ricky, Robin and Danielle in Bonaire
We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas season. After three very busy weeks in Louisiana and Florida visiting with friends and family, going to Christmas parties, and eating way too much, we were anxious to return to Curacao where we left 
We took the crew to 
Tim knew what he wanted to do, FISH. Unfortunately, we didn't catch any this trip.
After Joel and Rebekah left, the next group came in. Ricky's oldest brother and his wife and their other three children (Tim belongs to them as well) spent a week with us and at two different resorts. We moved the boat to a beautiful little cove called Santa Cruz Bay, where the water was crystal clear and the snorkeling was great. Here I celebrated my 50
Spotted Moray Eel
This beautiful .JPG)
