The Turtle Beach Conundrum - a photo on Flickriver

            There’s a lot of interesting wildlife here.  We shared our balcony with much of it at times.  Marauding wasps in the morning, unusually benign mosquitoes in the evening (I was covered in bites but none of them itched), and a mildly disturbing jumping spider called Stuart, who occasionally popped up right beside me, disturbing the morning coffee at unexpected moments.  Further afield we met hedgehogs wandering across moonlit roads and beautiful green lizards that basked on warm surfaces in the afternoon sun.  We even met a praying mantis called Penelope one day.  I’d never seen one before - she was quite a size too.  With the underwater camera I photographed all manner of sea creatures, including an Octopus called Ollie, who clung to a rock and pretended he wasn’t there.  If my mask hadn’t slipped and filled with seawater at the wrong moment, I’d have got a shot of him on the move, but by the time I’d sorted out the problem, he’d settled on the rock, where he held on steadfastly until after I’d given up waiting for him to move.  One afternoon at Kalamaki I met two very grumpy looking fish named Statler and Waldorf, sitting on the sea bed just a few yards away from the beach.  Later I found out what they were.  Weever Fish usually bury themselves in the sand, and waste no time in delivering a very nasty sting if you accidentally tread on one.  A good job nobody did then.  It pays to wear something on your feet when you’re swimming from a sandy beach.  Fin socks, not your Converse running shoes or your Doc Martens that is.   

Most memorable of all was the encounter with Lavinia the Loggerhead Turtle at Agios Sostis.  Admittedly it felt slightly staged, a local fisherman throwing tidbits from his boat as a small and impromptu crowd gathered on the quayside, but there was no denying that it was a fully grown turtle in the sea instead of an aquarium.  After a while, the man held out a net for tips.  We hardly ever use cash, and when we shrugged and showed our empty pockets, he shrugged in return and brought the show to a close.  But we’d seen a turtle, and we really hadn’t expected to in the middle of October.

Zakynthos is a turtle magnet you see, and the authorities are quite protective of their aquatic visitors, who arrive each summer in their thousands to lay their eggs on the beaches before returning to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  It seems that Lavinia has struck up an unlikely and mutually beneficial partnership with the local fishing community.  But for all the others there is the endless cycle of back and forth between these south European beaches and the beds of seagrass in the Caribbean thousands of miles away.  In October the eggs hatch and the lucky few baby turtles that make it join the migration route.  Here, they get a helping hand.  Areas at the back of some of the beaches have been roped off as no go zones for us humans, and nests are marked by small wooden frames that gradually dwindle in number as the hatchlings emerge each night and make their bid for the open sea.  Volunteers help to steward their progress across the sand, and rather crucially here at Gerakas, visitors are banished from the beach a little before sunset each day.

And while that is of course a very good thing, it does present a problem.  West facing beaches are at a premium on the island, and lying along a small peninsula at its southern tip, Gerakas is the only one that really offers us photographers an opportunity to shoot an epic watery sunset.  I’d pored over the online map at great length, which suggested the existence of a path along the top of it to the jagged white pinnacles of Jason’s Bite, presumably named for a leading argonaut.  But I still suspected that getting a sunset shot wouldn’t be entirely straightforward, and on arrival I quickly learned what I’d feared - the path was closed off, most probably because of cliff erosion.  Nobody wanted several tonnes of rock landing on those turtle nests after all.  There was a path in the opposite direction, but stray too far along it and compositions would quickly be truncated by the cliffs to the right hand side.  Maybe I could take my shots from the viewpoint at the top of the paths down to the beach itself then.  

On our first visit, we were indeed instructed to leave half an hour before sunset by a lady in a green tee shirt.  Racing up to the viewing platform only found me among a group of Selfiegrammers all jostling for a gawp at the orange orb disappearing over the other side of the island across the bay, and so I continued towards the path we’d seen earlier.  At the first place where the scrub gave way to a view sat a couple with a bottle of wine, and so with increasing frustration I carried on, hoping to find a vacant spot that might work.  Just in time, and moments before the view became unusable, I did.  After sunset, we walked back to the viewing platform at the top of the beach to discover that we’d have been ejected from there too if we’d lingered.  A good job nobody had cordoned off that cliff path as well - I’d have been very grumpy if I’d missed this.

Taken in: Greece / Ionian Islands / Zakynthos / Vasilikos (show map)

Taken on: October 10, 2023

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Sets appears in: • Zakynthos 2023

Groups appears in: • Sunrise, Sunset -- Anything Sun! • Sea & Ocean ( invite your contacts ) more » • "SEASCAPE" • Seascape/Landscape Junkies Worldwide • Photography Week • Flickr Social • Brain Vision. Art. « less

Camera: Canon EOS 80D, f/11.0, 1/50 sec, 35mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 80D
Lens:	18-35mm
Aperture:	f/11.0
Exposure Time:	0.02 sec (1/50)
Focal Length:	35mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	+1/3 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 13.0.2 (Windows)
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