he day started out with a 40 minute boat trip on the Calamus from Coney Island to a spot off Dockyard near the wreck of the Vixen.

While the boat chugged along, marine biologist and Eckerd College professor Peter Meylan passed around a prayer stick, ?Survivor? television show style, while each student said a little something about their hopes for the coming day or their disappointments from the day before.

On the previous day, students caught 22 green turtles and they hoped to catch as many on this day. Green turtles are an endangered species, but they are the most common type of turtle found in local waters. They are so called because of the layer of green fat under their shell.

There are also hawksbill turtles in Bermuda waters, and less commonly, leatherback and loggerhead turtles and the critically endangered Kemp?s ridley turtle.

The turtle tagging was part of a two week joint venture between The Caribbean Conservation Corporation (CCC) and the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo.

University students from 20 different countries took part in the project including a few from Bermuda.

When the Calamus reached the site, students and scientists donned flippers and snorkel masks and got on a smaller boat to go out to the Vixen. The dive boat pulled an even smaller boat carrying a large net.

As the boat neared the chosen spot snorkellers fell into the water in pairs. The net was drawn around the boat in a wide circle. Without the net it would be almost impossible to capture the turtles as they swim very quickly.

The net was good for catching green turtles, but not hawksbills which like to hide in the reefs rather than open water.

Team members Taran Card and LeeAnn Hinton were left on the dive boat to handle the captives.

?One directly ahead!? Mr. Card shouted to a nearby diver. The pace of the day picked up considerably with shouts of ?A turtle just got out!? and ?Over there!?.

?They sometimes escape by slipping over the top of the net if part of it is too low in the water,? Mr. Card explained.

When swimmers managed to corner a turtle in the net they held up their hand, and the dive boat would move toward them to pick up the turtle.

The next part of the exercise was a little more tricky. The swimmers either disentangled the turtle from the net and hung on to him (while trying to stay above water) until the turtle was taken on board, or they couldn?t disentangle it on board. Untangling a 40 kilogram turtle from a net was infuriating. As soon as one flipper was released, the head became stuck. Turtles are air breathing mammals, but can hold their breath underwater for at least half an hour so there was no immediate danger of suffocation from the nets. After a few minutes, a particularly difficult case was unwound and flipped over on his back and placed on the bottom of the boat.

The newly caught turtles? eyes and noses dripped mucus from a salt gland on their faces.

At one point Mr. Card spotted a turtle swimming towards an unguarded part of the net.

Donning a single flipper he jumped in and swam out towards the turtle, chasing it towards the net. Later, back on the boat he said: ?One flipper works better than no flipper.?

Meanwhile, in the distance, a tour boat chugged towards the group, with little awareness that there was a net, with swimmers scattered around. Ms Hinton waved frantically at the boat, which slowed down and approached more cautiously. Ms Hinton picked up one of the turtles and held it up for the tourists on the nearby boat to see. Their appreciative oohs and aahs could be heard across the water.

After every inch of the boat was filled with turtles, Mr. Card and Ms Hinton took readings for the water temperature on this day: 84.2 degrees Fahrenheit and the depth of the water, 7.8 feet, then headed back to the Calamus.

Back on the Calamus turtles were laid out on Styrofoam swimming noodles that had been shaped into horseshoes. Some of the turtles had identification tags on them indicating they had been captured before. Tagged turtles, called ?recaptures? were laid out on one side of the boat with untagged turtles on the other side. The untagged turtles received a numbered tag on each front flipper, and also a internal microchip called a ?pit? tag. This will allow them to be identified later.

?The size of the tag we use depends on the size of the turtle,? Dr. Meylan explained. ?This one needs a pit tag. We use a pit tag so that if the turtle has lost both external tags we can still recognise him.?

One student periodically hosed down the turtles to keep them from drying out or overheating while another waved a wand over the neck and flippers of each turtle in search of pit tags.

After the hours in the water battling turtles, everyone was sporting some kind of bleeding wound. A turtle?s bite really is much worse than its bark. Unfortunately, the turtles also had scars from encounters with humans. One had a long propeller scar down its plastron (lower shell). Another small turtle had a large, long-healed shark bite out of its side. The shark just managed to miss the turtle?s back flipper.

Any turtle anomalies were noted by Marydele Donnelly, the turtle advocate from Washington D.C. who was assigned recording duties.

The turtles were weighed. The largest one caught during this session weighed 43 kilograms. Blood samples were taken from the turtles to determine their gender, and the beach where they were born. It was unlikely that any of the turtles would have been born in Bermuda.

?Bermuda doesn?t have its own green turtle or hawksbill nesting colony, it is recruiting green turtles and hawksbill from elsewhere in the Caribbean,? Dr. Meylan said. ?Sea turtles in Bermuda come from all over the Caribbean and as far away as the Ascension Islands off the tip of Africa.

?Since Bermuda has protected its sea turtles for so long (since the 1600s) there are pretty good populations of different species so there are plenty for us to catch here, plus we can catch them over and over again without having to worry about turtle fishermen catching them in the meantime,? said Dr. Meylan.

The young turtles are around five years old when they arrive in Bermuda waters and they stay for the next 25 years until they are ready to reproduce. They won?t be ready to mate until they are between the ages of 30 and 50 years old. It is thought that some turtles may live to be 100 years old.

?When they arrive they are between 20 and 25 centimetres,? explained Dr. Jennifer Gray Bermuda Turtle Project Co-ordinator. They will grow to 65 to 70 centimetres by the time they leave Bermuda, although they still won?t be fully matured. We think they must go to the Caribbean and go through the maturation process there. Many of the turtles we have tagged end up on nesting grounds in Nicaragua.?

A few years ago the Bermuda Turtle Project managed to attach a satellite transmitter to a large turtle called Bermudiana that was just about to leave the Island. Bermudiana swam in an almost straight line southward. Hitting Hispanola after only a month or so she turned west and struck the tip of Cuba.

?We think she eventually ended up in a Cuban soup pot,? Dr. Gray said sadly.

Dr. Gray said a recent survey carried out on the Island found that many Bermudians were well aware of the plight of local turtles.

?Bermudians are really up on turtle conservation,? she said. ?A socio-economic survey done recently found that Bermudians certainly cared about turtles. Those who had eaten them in the past and couldn?t get them any more didn?t have a problem with protecting them now.?

Turtles in Bermuda also tend to be healthier and there was no sign of a disease called fibropapiloma found in turtles in other places such as Hawaii, Florida and the West Indies.

?One thing that is nice about Bermuda is that the disease is not here,? said Dr. Meylan. ?It is related to the Herpes virus, but not all animals that carry it express the disease. It may have something to do with the environment. It is an indication that the green turtles in Bermuda are healthy. This is a healthy place for them to grow.?

?Shortly after this interview a nest of 150 loggerhead turtle eggs was found on Cooper?s Island. It was the first successful nesting of sea turtles in Bermuda in 70 years. 91 hatchlings were released into the ocean by scientists and volunteers.