Today is an incredibly special day.
Myself and the rescue team are going to be heading out on one of our beautiful
big boats to release Lemon, the loggerhead sea turtle.
Lemon, the loggerhead was actually found really close to a boat ramp
on a local beach, and it was feared that she might have ingested plastic.
She might have had eggs on board.
She was quite lethargic and definitely wasn't acting how a turtle normally should.
So luckily, there were passers by that were there to intervene
and actually take her into our care here at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital.
It's been a long journey for Lemon getting up to this point.
We had to make sure that she was in fact 100% healthy
before we think about releasing her back to the wild.
So that meant she had to undergo X-rays, blood tests,
but luckily
with all of the incredible care that she's received from the team here, only now,
is she healthy enough to head back out into the wild.
I am incredibly stoked for today.
It's always really awesome when you get to release any animal,
but particularly an animal like this.
Loggerheads are now classed as critically endangered along with every other
sea turtle species in our area, which is incredibly sad.
You know that every healthy adult that you put back out into the wild,
that's another one contributing to the species.
And she'll probably go on to lay little eggs of her own and have offspring.
That will be the future for this gorgeous animal.
Alright, we'll get you back then.
So here we are
at the little loading and unloading spot here at the boat ramp.
But we're going to head out
and then get this little girl released as quick as possible.
[Toby] Like, I put it in the water
and it was fine, and now all of a sudden...
These things happen.
[Robert] Well, yeah. [Toby] I guess...
[Robert] This-this happens.
Never, ever get a boat.
Don't ever buy a boat.
So we've just just lost steering on the boat.
If it's ever going to happen,
now's a good time for it to happen because we're not actually out on the water.
What we're going to have to do is go for our backup plan,
which is to do a beach release for the loggerhead turtle.
So there is-there's a beach pretty much around the corner
from where we were going to let her go anyway.
Well, that definitely didn't go 100% to plan, did it?
This is what you've got to do whenever you're doing any wildlife rescue
or release. Sometimes you know stuff can go wrong and our plan A
was to get her out on the Patricia, on the big boat, out into open water.
But every now and again, you have technical problems.
And with that steering failure, we had to go with Plan B, but
we didn't just head out into the big waves and release her.
We were really specific with finding a beach like this.
You can see there's no waves. There's no current.
It's nice and still and calm. Definitely didn't go to plan, we wrecked a boat.
But we got the turtle released and that's the main thing.
Mission success, that was awesome.