This Is Why It Took Me Over An Hour To Save His Life

Remember the smiling turtle from my last post? Let me add the picture again to remind you.

There is a sad story with a happy ending related to this sea turtle guy, my buddy. I just call him Buddy.

And the story goes like…

A few months ago I went on my usual morning snorkeling, when I spotted Buddy (the turtle) being stranded in a fishing net. First I freaked out, because I didn´t know what to do. It looked like there was no way for him to survive the situation. There was only one thing I could think of. I had to save his life. As the adrenalin rushed through my body, I rushed for his rescue. As I got closer to him, I noticed that not only he was tangled in the fishing net completely, but he had lots of plastic hanging on him, too. He could hardly move. I could see the sadness and fear on his friendly face. Honestly it was a tough situation, but luckily I was around. First I freed him from the net with my knife. You can imagine how difficult it is to try to cut a net with your knife without hurting a struggling wild animal. Let me tell you. I was sweating in the water…

It took a while to free him from the fishing net and by that time we were both exhausted. I then held him by the remaining net, and we started swimming ashore together, so we can rest out.

Let me tell you I didn`t expect my day to start with this, and I also got late from work, but saving Buddy was my first priority. As soon as we were ashore I could properly get started with carefully removing all the waste from his body with my knife. I was also speaking to him kind words the whole time in a positive way, so he knows I am not there to hurt him.

The amount of plastic trash I had to remove from his legs was disgusting. People, we have responsibility, we need to take care of our animals and planet.

I mean seriously, just look at the picture bellow. What do you want to see when you go swimming in the sea?

You know many places in the world you see the disgusting plastic floating around already. All the fish died there already. They think that the plastic is food, so they eat it! You know what else? You end up eating fish that ate plastic. I read a lot and saw that the WWF published some alarming data. According to them we ingest the equivalent of one credit card a week due to the presence of plastics and microplastics in water, salt or fish.

I don`t know about you but I prefer to see this when I go swimming…