Hurricane Day

Ernesto finally arrived! On Monday night, we discussed the option of evacuating to Orange Walk and seven of the volunteers decided that they wanted to evacuate before Ernesto and left on the 6 am bus on Tuesday morning. I decided to stay at Wildtracks with two other volunteers. I got up to feed Twiggy and it was slightly raining, but it wasn't too bad outside. After the monkey feed, it actually got nice and sunny out. We made a list of everything that needed to be done and realized we needed to have enough sea grass for two to three days, so we went out to pick sea grass. It was getting pretty gloomy on our way out and since Twiggy was in, we could take the motor boat to the farther out patches of sea grass. Once we started picking sea grass, it began to pour and it never really let up. The wind also got pretty bad, so it got quite wavy. We got four buckets full and decided to head back in. After feeding monkeys again, we started to clean all the sea grass but then we decided to skip the cleaning and just tie bunches to the frame to save on time. We captured Duke again, so he could get fed before the hurricane. It was decided to keep Duke and Twiggy in the lagoon, so we put Duke back in after his feed and then started on preparing the monkeys for the hurricane. The howlers with the weaker enclosures were all moved inside the manatee building. After everyone was settled for the evening, we changed out of our soaked clothes and started preparing dinner. Then we realized we were out of gas, so we couldn't cook anything for dinner. Paul bought us ice cream in town since we stayed behind to help, which was amazing! We had ice cream and some leftovers of lunch for dinner. Since Ernesto was predicted to come in at about 9 pm, all the volunteers slept in the house. It was a windy night, but overall wasn't too bad.