Sharon Feinstein

It’s an important day for me, the culmination of a lot of hard work to get this campaign finally launched. I’ve got it into my head to try and do something to help the leatherback turtles in Tobago and save them from human beings. It all depends on getting donations of 25k to send the right person to Tobago, as explained on my website under Turtle Campaign, and from there we can try to change the course of their history on this small paradise island in the Caribbean. These leatherbacks can dive down more than 3,300 feet, as deep as any whale. I was mesmerised when I watched the huge female laying her eggs, plopping out one after another into the hole she’d dug. I went forward, tentatively, and touched the underside of her flipper. I felt like I’d touched the bottom of the ocean because that hide had been down so deep, and somehow she took my imprint back into the sea with her when she returned. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about these creatures long after I’d got back to London life. Months of thought, conversations, meetings and research have led me to today.Leatherbacks travel 3,000 miles from their nesting sites, but every few years the female returns to her ancestral beach to lay her eggs. Tobago is one of just a handful of places on the planet where this happens, and if we stop the slaughter and adverse conditions here, the leatherbacks have the chance to survive rather than dying out and becoming extinct after surviving for 150 million years before we stepped in.

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