Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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Finding Crush
I’m not sure what I expected to see as my wife and I walked through the doors of the Cayman Islands Turtle Farm last Wednesday morning.
We were in the middle of a week-long cruise on the “Fun Ship” Carnival Liberty while Lisha and Roger and Lee and a few others were babysitting the Cosmos back home (and doing a great job, by the way). It was a vacation we’d been looking forward to for a long time, not because we’re all that crazy about cruising (we took our last one on Disney seven years ago), but we just needed a break. We knew we’d eat too much and rest not enough, but a change is as good... etc.
The ship’s itinerary was already changed by the time we boarded in Miami, because of the late-blooming tropical storm Ida. So instead of going to the Mayan Riviera first, we went the other side of Cuba on the way to Jamaica. Still a rocky first night, though, to the point where the dancers were pulled out of the “Welcome Aboard” show at the Venetian Palace theatre, and replaced by the non-stop mouth of the cruise director, a very un-butch fellow named Butch from a small town in Minnesota.
The cruise had three ports of call - Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and the Mexican island of Cozumel off the coast of the Yucatan. There were, of course, a bewildering number of shore excursions at each port, offering everything from snorkeling to horseback riding to zip-lining above the tropical canopy.
One of the excursions we had pre-booked; I wasn’t about to miss the chance to finally tour a Mayan city, in this case Tulum, across the strait from Cozumel. I’ll tell you about that experience another time.
In Jamaica, my lady lazed aboard the ship, while I did a bit of souvenir shopping not too far from the pier.
But in Grand Cayman, several different excursions included the Turtle Farm, and I enjoy meeting new wildlife when given a chance. One of them also invited you to spend a while swimming with the sting rays, but as I may have mentioned in another column, I don’t make a habit of deliberately going out and courting death. I have no desire to get stabbed through the heart like Steve Irwin.
Now Butch the cruise director kidded us along by saying the cruise line had stopped sending its passengers on death-dealing excursions several years previously, but I wasn’t going to no Sting-Ray City, not me. So we chose the half-day excursion called “Turtles, Turtles and more Turtles.”
Just a title, I figured. How many turtles could there be?
As it turned out, it wasn’t just turtles after all. There was a nature walk pointing out all manner of local trees and shrubs. There was a walk-in aviary with a couple of dozen fascinating and colourful birds, and there was a large enclosure containing a specimen of the rare Cayman blue iguana (which wasn’t too blue that day because the sun was hiding).
But mostly, there were turtles, lordy were there turtles. There were a few hawkbills and other sea-going species, but the star of the farm is the green sea turtle, the type featured in one of the greatest animated films ever (which my grandson and I love equally), Finding Nemo.
As soon as we walked through the doors of the farm, we saw a huge artificial pond with a sand beach on the far side. We got closer and saw little heads breaking the surface of the water. Then we looked over the railing, and saw literally hundreds of turtles swimming around, each of them about two or three feet in diameter.
This, we soon learned, was the mating pond, and it contained the farm’s 400-strong breeding herd (300 of them females!). The beach was where the females went to lay their eggs, where they were immediately collected and put in the hatchery. Not that the ladies care; in the wild, they lay the eggs and immediately abandon them. Not a strong maternal instinct.
But they’re prolific. Last year was a bad year at the farm, they only hatched about 6,000 turtlets (I forgot to ask what baby turtles are called). This year they’re already up to 30,000.
It’s called a farm because its primary purpose is agricultural, raising prime turtle steaks for Caribbean cuisine. But they also have a herd for scientific research, and are in the business of re-stocking the seas; in 40 years, they’ve put over 30,000 turtles back in the ocean.
One-year-olds are the best for re-stocking the sea, before they’ve abandoned their natural instincts. They’re best for the soup pot at five, and for mating at 10 (and can then live another 50 or 60 years). So the farm had them in a dozen different tanks, sorted by age. Some of the younger ones we were encouraged to take out and hold. Which I did.
Cute little guys. Very serene, not at all like our snappers. Sociable. Which made it a bit jarring when we were invited a while later to sample turtle soup.
I declined. For a fan of Finding Nemo, it was a bit yucky. I kept expecting the pot of soup to say “dude”.
