Fishermen save endangered sea turtle in Surfside
SURFSIDE BEACH — Red Cranfill and Steve Walls were adrift on Cedar Lake on Sunday morning looking to hook the perfect redfish.
The duo already had yanked three out of the still bay near the Brazoria-Matagorda county line when Walls said he noticed something bobbing up and down on the water.
It was a large turtle’s head, and as it continued coming up for air, Walls and Cranfill got closer and said they could see it was caught on a trout line.
The line was wrapped around the turtle’s front left flipper so tightly the appendage was hanging by only a thread of its skin, said Walls, a Jones Creek resident.
“We realized pretty quick she wasn’t going to make it in that water as stressed as she was,” said Cranfill of Clute.
In a matter of minutes, Cranfill’s and Walls’ morning leisure had turned into a rescue mission.
The fishermen’s truck had become an animal ambulance, ferrying the injured turtle in the airboat hitched to the back and keeping its barnacle-clad shell moist for the 30-mile journey.
Walls got the phone number of a Galveston-based sea turtle rescue hotline and agreed to meet with a rescuer in Surfside Beach.
The men continued caring for the injured stranger while waiting in Surfside Beach. Cranfill and Walls took turns dousing the turtle with water and keeping a close eye on its movements.
The turtle seemed exhausted, drooling a bit, shifting itself around and raising and lowering its head with discernible gasps and muffled moaning noises.
Help arrived at 12:40 p.m. From the group’s rendezvous point at Surfside Beach, Shanna Kethan, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Galveston fisheries lab, took the turtle to the Houston Zoo for treatment.
Zoo officials amputated the turtle’s injured flipper Sunday, but Kethan said it should be able to survive once back in the wild.
“They use their back flippers more for steering and their front flippers are more for propulsion,” she said.
The loggerhead sea turtle lives in coastal waters from Texas to the Mediterranean Sea, Kethan said.
Sunday’s find weighed in at about 121 pounds, she said.
A mature loggerhead weighs up to 220 pounds and takes about 20 years to reach maturity, Kethan said. Gender isn’t recognizable until a loggerhead is mature.
Turtles laying eggs in area waters normally come ashore between April 1 and Sept. 30, she said.
Kethan said juvenile loggerheads normally do not enter inland waters, but the turtle’s injury might have played a role.
“Depending on how long his flipper has been like that, he may have been caught in the Intracoastal (Waterway) and drifted into the bay,” Kethan said.
Kethan doubts anyone intentionally hurt the turtle with a trout line but said fishermen should take extra care not to leave them behind.
A veterinarian will examine the turtle after about a year of recovery to determine if it should be released back into the wild, Kethan said.
Though his fishing time was noticeably cut short, Walls now has a a 120-pound fish tale worth telling.
“It ain’t every day you get to catch one of those,” he said.
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