See a Turtle in its natural environment

This is one of my life’s achievements that has sort of happened by accident and was not something I particularly had a great desire to do until fairly recently. The realisation that I secretly harboured this desire became apparent when we were sat in a travel agent, looking at holidays. We had narrowed our options down to about 3 locations and were struggling, until we were told that one of the Greek islands was among the sites where Turtles went to lay their eggs and the dates we were looking at fell right into the hatching season. I was sold and off we went to Zante. The holiday was great, we had a nice relaxing time despite our hotel being right by the airport runway and being disturbed by the early morning flights but the Turtles remained elusive. There were a few people who had seen an eruption of hatchlings during a walk down the beach and the evidence of the nests were all over the place but I must have been really unlucky as my quest to see a Turtle remained unfulfilled. We had even been on a boat trip to see the famous shipwreck where they specifically mentioned a possibility of seeing them in one of the coves but on the day we were not lucky enough. After a few days of not seeing any turtles we decided to book one of the trips that took you to the sites where you were most likely to get a glimpse of the creatures in their natural habitat and I was quite excited at the prospect, we waited eagerly at the pick up point and were greeted by a man on a scooter who came over and told us that our trip could not go ahead as the weather conditions were not good enough for them to take the boats out. We accepted our refund and the next day we went home, tanned and relaxed but sadly without any contact with the famous turtles of Zante. A few years later we were on Honeymoon in The Maldives, we had already been to see a Turtle hatchery in Sri Lanka and had held Turtles so my quest had sort of been fulfilled but I was still amazed and thrilled when during our trip on a Glass Bottom Boat I spotted a Turtle shaped figure among the Coral. The driver of the boat hadn’t seen it and reversed the boat when I said I thought I’d spotted it and he confirmed my suspicions. There, right beneath us was an adult Green turtle, male of about 5/6 foot. We sat watching for a few minutes before we lost sight of him but just those few moments made this 30 minute trip into a magical event that I will never forget.