Rich and I visited the Juno Beach Loggerhead Marinelife Center  while we were in South Florida over Memorial Day weekend.  My grandparents used to live right down the street from the “turtle museum,” as we called it, and my cousins and I enjoyed seeing the turtles and watching the little babies run down to the ocean.

Now that I’m married to a turtle lover, it’s fun to share this place with my husband.  Rich always has such a good time looking at the turtles!

The center rehabilitates wild turtles and then releases them back into the wild.  They have a series of tanks where the turtles live while they are under treatment.  We saw Loggerhead turtles and Green Sea turtles.  My favorites were the Green Turtles, who were a little smaller and less covered in barnacles.

The Marinelife Center sponsors nightly “turtle walks” during turtle nesting season.  Rich and I went to one last year.  This year the walks hadn’t yet started, so we took our own walk on the beach after dark to see if we could find some turtles.

There was a full moon that night, but the sky was so cloudy that it was almost completely obscured.  We walked up and down the beach searching for turtles, without any luck.  As we headed back to the car, the moon peeked through the clouds, lighting the landscape.

I didn’t have a tripod with me, and to photograph the scene in front of me, I needed to use a slow shutter speed.  So I sat down on the sand, braced my camera on my arm, and made some long exposures.  I was pleased to see that some of the images were not totally blurry! I loved the blue skies and the stars peeking through the clouds.