These are the totals from my data sheets, added up every Friday night at the kitchen table. Each week runs Saturday through Friday, starting with our first morning out, Saturday, May 1. "Nests" are crawls where the turtle laid eggs. "False" means false crawls, where she came up and went back without nesting. "Hatched" is the number of nests that hatched that week, and "Lost" is nests that were dug up by raccoons or washed out by the surf.

Notes

^a Our one leatherback nest, Tuesday, May 11. A track more than six feet wide. I sat down on the sand and looked at it for a while before I could write anything.
^b First nest lost to a raccoon. Five all season. Teddy put wire screens over the nests closest to the dune crossovers after that, which helped.
^c The busiest week of the season: 35 nests. Lenore and I didn't get off the beach before ten all week.
^d First hatch of the season, Tuesday, June 29, from one of the very first May nests. Raccoons got two that week.
^e The Fourth of July weekend. I filled in more holes and knocked down more sand castles on Monday morning than I care to count.
^f Hurricane Floyd. No patrol on Tuesday the 14th or Wednesday the 15th; we were evacuated. Fourteen nests washed out.
^g Two of the nests that were washed over by Floyd's surf hatched this week anyway. Good girls.

The arithmetic, for my former students: 312 + 14 + 1 = 327 nests in all. Of those, 286 have hatched and 19 were lost, which leaves 327 − 286 − 19 = 22 nests still in the sand as of Friday, September 24. Nesting crawls and false crawls together come to 637 turtles' visits to my beach this year. Show your work!

The last of the late nests should hatch in October. When the last one is done and dug, our season is over, and I'll put the final numbers up here.