Good news! We discovered that two new nests had been laid in the interim since our last visit to this stretch of beach. Both were Loggerhead nests ("CC"). A highlight of the beachwalk was that we got to meet Nicki (not sure of the spelling), an employee of the EAI group that we had previously indicated was the company that was hired to keep official track of all of the turtle nests on a number of beaches in our county. She came over on her 4-wheel beach vehicle to where we were recording the points of latitude and longitude of one of the new nests and started a conversation with us. I think that she was just making sure that we were not disturbing the nest in any way and wanted to know what we were doing. We explained that we never disturbed the nests, but were just recording the coordinates for our record sheet/chart - as we had done for the last couple of years. We then asked her about the two Leatherback nests that were near our location and appeared to be in danger of being washed away by the waves. Nicki indicated that they normally do not "transplant" the eggs of endangered nests, letting them fend for themselves with the weather. She said that she had already seen several Leatherback nests be washed away further south on the beach (beyond the stretch of beach that we cover). So, it appears that we may see the two nests in question be washed away in the near future if we have any strong storms and waves in the next couple of weeks. When we told her that we were projecting that the nests were due to hatch in the next week (refer to our chart in previous blog entries), she said that the 55 day average that we had from last year's chart would probably not apply to the Leatherback nests, since they may take anywhere up to 70 days to hatch. So much for our "average # of days incubation" from last year - but it does make sense, since the Leatherbacks are a much larger turtle with larger eggs to incubate. Hope that they hurry this year!