Awareness during your dives helps turtles

Awareness.

Awareness is something we teach all our divers. During your Discover Scuba Dive, your open water dive course or your guided dives you might encounter a turtle or two. Look at this movie and see our divers enjoy their encounter with these amazing animals. Awareness in this case means there are a couple  of facts you should know when you are diving in a spot with turtles

What to do/not to do?

Don’t chase them! When you stay calm and relaxed, and even make eye contact with the turtle he will let you come pretty close so you can observe or make a great photo.

Turtles need to go to the surface to breathe, so when you see a turtle trying to go up leave him alone. He will breathe a couple of times and come back down.

Don’t touch them! The bacterias we carry with us on our skin might give the turtle a disease. Besides this you only scare them away.

Don’t feed them, let them find their own food. If they get used to being fed by divers/snorkelers they will stop trying to find their own food. When they get really hungry they might mistake your finger for a snack.

Did you know PADI offers a Project Aware specialty concerning turtles? If you love turtles you might want to look into this specialty, might be just the thing for you.

Here on Curaçao we usually see the Green turtle and the Hawksbill turtle. The Green turtle we often find shallower, looking for beds of seagrass. The Hawksbill we see more on the reef itself, scraping algae of the corals. From time to time turtles also nest on Curaçao. So if you’re very, very, very lucky you might see some tiny turtles hatching from their eggs and finding their way to the ocean.

We are still waiting for that precious moment, would love to see this ourselves. Until then we just enjoying observing turtles and teaching you about them during our dives.

 

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