The one time I dont have my camera...

This is easily the coolest thing I've seen here on Diego Garcia. Some of you might not believe this story, and I wouldn't blame you. I have no proof since I didn't have a camera. You're just gonna have to take my word for it.

To preface the story, let me tell you how I spent most of the day. Got up at 4:30am to make sure I was at the site to launch a balloon at 5:15am. After that I spent most of the morning and afternoon sitting in the crate working on some research and taking advantage of the "good" internet connection there. Later on I went back to the hotel and kept working. Eventually I started thinking about how much time I was spending indoors and what kind of things I could be missing.

Around 4pm I went to the gym to lift and run a bit, but afterward I was feeling pretty good so I decided to go run some more on the mountain bike trails. After a mile or so of zig zagging trails I came to "Cannon Point", which is right on the Indian Ocean. I still had a lot of energy so I kept running down the beach on ocean side of the atoll. The only other time I had been here it was high tide, which made running down the beach impossible.

After another half mile running on the sand I noticed some tracks in the sand coming out of the water that were obviously made by a large sea turtle. As I got closer I realized there was only one set, so the turtle had still be on land laying her eggs. Just as I got up the tracks the turtle emerged from the bushes. This thing was huge! I would say the carapace (i.e. dorsal portion of the shell) alone was 3 feet long.

I was standing less than 6 feet away as I watched it crawl back into the ocean. It seemed pretty exhausted and kept stopping every few feet to rest. The area where it had made a nest was a maze of limbs and roots, so I imagine it was a pretty difficult spot to get to and dig. Its body also seemed very heavy out of the water and considering  that it only had flippers to push itself along I can imagine it must be a physically taxing task.

I was totally in awe of what I had just seen and felt pretty lucky to have seen this. After doing some reading I now know that this was a green sea turtle. I found this webpage talking about the two types of sea turtles found on Diego Garcia and the author also include some pictures of the same event I witnessed. I also saw here that when green sea turtles are mating the female can come ashore as much as 5 times every 15 days! So while what I saw is probably pretty common, its still something I might not ever see again.

After the turtle was gone I went and looked around the nest area and stood there for awhile thinking about how cool this all was. Then just before I continued my run down the beach I looked out over the Indian Ocean towards the horizon, and what did I see? A F***ING DOUBLE RAINBOW!!!

What an awesome day! The only thing missing was someone to share it with.