Category: Outreach

****UPDATE****
This season’s online merchandise sale is now closed. We appreciate the support and hope you enjoy your items. If you missed your chance, catch us in 2026!
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As we prepare to wrap up our season, we wanted to offer a chance for those of you unable to purchase merchandise in person this season a chance to purchase online! Online PCB Turtle Watch merchandise sales are now available through Tuesday October 28, 2025 (or when supplies/sizes are depleted)! We introduced a new item this season, a unisex tank top available in two colors!

Many of you have asked how you can purchase one of our Turtle Watch t-shirts, hats/visors or reusable bags online and have it shipped. Well now is your chance!
For a limited time between now and Tuesday October 28th, 2025 you can place your order and we will fulfill those orders first come, first serve.

Please see the order form for more information.

Don’t miss your chance, this is a one time opportunity as we wrap up our 2025 season! We appreciate your support this season🐢

When they aren’t out marking nests or monitoring for hatch activity, some of our volunteers conduct local education outreach.  We love when we are contacted by local organizations to share information about our program and protecting sea turtles.  The audiences range from elementary age students to local civic organizations and weekly guests at local hotels or condos.  In the last few months, we have had the chance to conduct education outreach at Rising Leaders Academy, Bay Day, Waller Elementary, Hutchinson Beach Elementary and Landmark Holiday Beach Resort.  We are always excited by the interest everyone has during our presentation and then the questions they ask.  We enjoy getting the opportunity to present and then let get an up close view of our educational specimens and items that help everyone understand the dangers to sea turtles and how they can help.

As we head into the summer, we want to thank Pompano Joe’s Panama City Beach for their annual donation to our Panama City Beach Turtle Watch program. When you are in town this summer, stop by and give the Turtle Brew a try or pick up a 🐢 t-shirt!

Panama City Beach Turtle Watch is entering it’s 35 season (May 1 – October 31) of protecting nesting and hatching sea turtles, under a state issued permit by FWC.

We patrol 18 miles of beach from St Andrews State Park to Camp Helen State Park. We are a non-profit organization with ATV surveyors that patrol the beaches just before sunrise looking for fresh sea turtle crawls as most nesting (and hatching) activity occurs overnight. When they find a crawl, the surveyor determines if it is a nest and if so, they contact one of our volunteers that have been through FWC and local training on how to properly identify the characteristics of the crawl and nest and mark it for protection. It takes about 2 months on our beaches for the eggs to incubate, hatch and emerge. At which time we also have volunteers checking nightly for disoriented hatchlings as artificial lighting is the number one threat to hatchling sea turtles. If disoriented hatchlings are found, they are collected and placed into the Gulf by volunteers. Volunteers then excavate the nest 3-4 days following the hatch to assess the nest contents. Throughout the season, we are gathering data and reporting it to FWC as part of their efforts to determine nesting trends and assessing the population.

While the general public may not be directly authorized to specifically help with the nest protection that our program performs, there are ways to help. Everyone can keep our beaches clean, dark and flat. Leave No Trace (local ordinance) when you leave the beach for the day (sundown to sunup), remove everything and dispose of trash properly. Keep it dark (local lighting ordinance for beachfront properties), turn off exterior lights, close your curtains, avoid using white light while on the beach (if necessary, use a red LED flashlight) and never use flash photography if you encounter a sea turtle on the beach. Lastly, leave the beaches flat, avoid leaving holes and knock down your sand castles. Doing all of this will help sea turtles avoid expending wasted energy. They are designed for the water so the fewer obstacles they face on the beach the better chance they have for nesting or hatching and then returning to the water.

The most common species nesting on PCB is the loggerhead (a threatened species), along with some greens and the occasional leatherback. We invite the everyone to follow here on our website https://turtlewatch.org or Facebook page, Panama City Beach Turtle Watch, for information throughout this season. We have closed our volunteer application process for the season but invite any locals or visitors to follow our events on Facebook. Starting mid-July, we begin announcing excavations, a chance for anyone in the area to come and watch our volunteers in action and get a chance to see the contents of a hatched nest.

If you see a sea turtle on the sandy beach, keep your distance, avoid using any light and contact us via Facebook or through PCB Police’s non-emergency phone number and they will reach out to our volunteers.

Today we celebrated our 2024 Panama City Beach Turtle Watch team. Our 2024 team dedicated many hours this season to help protect sea turtles and they deserve to be celebrated! A special thank you to Pompano Joe’s Panama City Beach for allowing us to celebrate our 2024 season as we gathered to enjoy drinks, appetizers, a great view and socializing.

PS Be sure to stop by and try one of Pompano Joe’s Turtle Brews or grab one of their t-shirts as they are a great partner with making a donation to our program yearly from those sales.

As we prepare to wrap up our season, we wanted to offer a chance for those of you unable to purchase merchandise in person this season a chance to purchase online!
Online PCB Turtle Watch merchandise sales are now available through Sunday October 13, 2024 (or when supplies/sizes are depleted)!

Many of you have asked how you can purchase one of our Turtle Watch t-shirts, hats/visors or reusable bags online and have it shipped. Well now is your chance!
For a limited time between now and Sunday October 13, 2024 you can place your order and we will fulfill those orders first come, first serve.

Please see the order form for more information.

Don’t miss your chance, this is a one time opportunity as we wrap up our 2024 season! We appreciate your support this season🐢

Our education outreach team partnered with Gulf World Marine Institute to host an outreach session for Girl Scout Troop 103 from Tallahassee. They were visiting PCB to learn about sea turtles and they all have a strong affinity for marine life (they have toured other marine life facilities). During this visit, they earned their Water Badge after seeing our educational specimens, hearing about our program and sea turtle species common to this area. They also observed the GWMI rehabilitation activities for sea turtles including treatments being performed on a loggerhead patient. We are inspired by the passion this group of ladies had for marine life and who knows, maybe they will one day be professionals in the field or volunteers themselves!

PCB Turtle Watch has now completed their remake of the Disney movie “Holes”.  We had 8 nests that suffered from washover and/or accretion from Tropical Storm Alberto mid June that stopped the development of the eggs.  None of these nests showed signs of having hatched so as each one reached day 80 from being laid they were excavated to locate and count the number of eggs.  These excavations were not announced to the public and our lead excavator enticed volunteers to attend under the guise of a free boot camp, focused on an upper body workout.  Some of these nests had over 3 feet of accretion that had to be moved just to reach the original beach level to then dig another 2 foot looking for the eggs.  After many hours of moving many cubic yards of sand, digging out completely buried nest stakes and caution/survey tape and filling the holes back in, we have now excavated all of these failed nests.  We appreciate the hours and physical effort put forth by every one of our volunteers that helped us during these excavations.  We always appreciate our volunteers but to willingly sign up night after night for these excavations receives an extra special Thank You!

Excavation of these 8 nests revealed 506 unhatched eggs that showed little to no development. Sea turtles can nest 3-7 times in a season so while these nests weren’t successful, we’d like to think other nests laid by these females have or will have much better results this season. Stay up to date on total number of nests hatched and hatchings that have emerged here on our website, we are at over 1600 hatchlings so far this season!

Activities performed under MTP-038

We were honored to participate in the Science and Discovery Center’s Pirates and Mermaids camp this past week. Our volunteers shared information about our program and then allowed the campers to see some of the specimens up close. Young minds are like sponges and the campers were attentive and had the opportunity to learn about Sea Turtles and ways we can all help protect them.

Now that our 2024 hatching has started we would like to recognize two of our volunteers heavily involved in our hatching activities.

At the beginning of this season Nancy Evou and Betsy Straley were both recognized by Panama City Beach Turtle Watch with Lifetime Achievement awards recognizing their long running contributions to our program. To relate their years of service to sea turtles, the hatchlings that they helped in their first year could very well be returning to our beaches now or in a few years to lay their own nests!

Our program has been in place since 1991 and let’s just say these two volunteers have done it all! They have contributed countless hours each year and we hope they are able to continue for many more!

In her recent volunteer years, Betsy is out on the beach at night as part of the hatching monitoring team. She also helps with our education outreach initiatives and strandings (sick, injured or deceased sea turtles).

Nancy is involved in just about every aspect of PCB TW. Her volunteer efforts are most often seen through the education outreach, strandings and very much so all of the nest excavations!

We are very appreciative of all of the efforts and hours that Nancy and Betsy give to our program and look forward to having them on our team for many years ahead!