In the Indian Ocean there’s an old fisher’s trick. The wily hunter catches a remora. They tie a line to its tail and throw it loose. Living up to its suckerfish moniker with a forehead wrinklier than your feet after a night in the tub, the remora suctions its scalp to a turtle’s shell. And the gleeful fisherman reels them both in.
I remember thinking that sounded clever. I never expected to be the fish.
As we skipped over the opalescent ocean surface in our battered blue wood-and-fiberglass dinghy that night I gazed up at the waxing moon. What on Earth was happening?
It was August 2024 in the Pearl Islands off Panama’s Pacific Coast. Fresh mangoes hung like gaudy raindrops in the trees. Just offshore the whales were singing. And the turtles were nesting - or should have been.
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There were eight of us in the boat that night, all twenty-somethings or twenty-somethings at heart. For fourteen nights we’d patrolled the near-deserted archipelago’s wind-brushed beaches, sleepless, mile after mile.
We’d found snakes, sharks, crocodiles and drug smugglers, survived a boat crash and picked up two armed guards - tank-like Panamanian navy men in green. I’d reached a point of such sleep deprivation that one morning my eyes picked a spot about a foot in front of me and just stopped focusing as I walked about - the strangest feeling. And yet the only two nesting turtles we’d found were olive ridleys.
The olive ridley is a solid B+ turtle in my books. But scientists call them ‘practice turtles.’ They’re easily the most common sea turtle species - over half a million of them nested on a single beach in India last year. They’re the second smallest turtle after their close cousins the Kemp’s ridleys and if we’re being shallow, far from the best looking.
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Most importantly for us, they tend to nest every year. We had just ten GPS transmitters, each costing more than I make in a month, to affix to turtles’ shells in the hope of tracking one up to Coiba, down to Colombia or across to the Galapagos and getting the vast marine protected area filling that transcontinental triangle expanded into Panama’s gulf.
For that we needed greens, travelling for up to five years between nestings. In a sane world we’d have seen at least a dozen of them coming up to nest. This was, after all, their peak season. In a sane world we’d have waited till they were in their egg laying trance or dragging themselves down the beach back to sea. In a sane world we’d have calmly crawled up, cleaned the shell and glued on the GPS tag easy as you like. This was not a sane world. That entire season across the archipelago and much of the Eastern Pacific not a single green turtle came up to nest.
So there we were skipping over the opalescent ocean surface in our battered blue wood-and-fiberglass dinghy gazing up at the moon. 48 hours to go and no tags deployed. This was plan E: night-time freediving turtle-catching.
I slid into the water. The popcorn crackling of the reef at night filled my ears. I flicked the dive torch around, heart pumping, breaths coming fast. My entire childhood I’d had three overwhelming phobias: the sea, the dark and sharks. I prayed I’d only face two that night. I checked my watch. We had one hour to turn things around before the tide was too high to dive down to the turtles feeding and sleeping on the sea floor.
“TORTUGAA!!” The local team surfaced with a shiny young hawksbill barely 5 metres away. Its flippers windmilled at the surface, sending disco droplets cascading in all directions.
“TORTUGAAAA!!” A second team, this time with a male green.
I turned to my partner bobbing beside me, forced my steam-engine breathing under control and pointed into the inky sea ahead. Game on.
The cries faded, the vast dark expanse stretched out before us. Empty. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. We turned around. Suddenly, there, thirty feet below us, soaring over the sand was a turtle. As slowly as I could so as not to startle her, I dived. She grew larger. My heart pounded in my ears. For a serene moment, I glided a foot above her, a perfect mirror. Then with a wildlife rescuer’s reflexes, half-Steve Irwin, half-suckerfish, I dropped the torch and latched onto her shell.
My world span. Black - white - black - white. A flipper caught my mask and knocked it loose. Through the hole in my glove I felt the rim of the shell. The turtle dived. I lost track of time. I couldn’t think, couldn’t let go, couldn’t do anything except channel all my strength into pointing this 500 lb torpedo skyward. Was that skyward? I didn’t know. We began to corkscrew once more, round and round, black - white - black - white. I could see the surface. My chest burned, heaved. Then the warm night air was around me. I’d done it.
“TORTUGAAAAA!!” my partner cried. “Are you alright?”
I floated, panting, unable to speak. Clutched to my chest, 5ft long and triple my weight, the largest green turtle ever recorded on the archipelago mirrored my breaths.
The bell blue hull of our boat sliced through the water towards me. On its side in jaunty white letters was painted its name. I’d never read it before, I thought as it slid to a stop beside me: Deja el Bochinche - ‘Cut the Drama.’ The camo clad biceps of our navy guards appeared over the side as they hauled my shell-shod soul mate in for tagging. Sometimes conservation’s as easy as catching turtles.
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