Diver rescues sea turtle from harassment in Seal Beach

A veteran scuba diver on Friday dove to the bottom of a cooling channel that serves a local power plant in Seal Beach and rescued a green sea turtle that had been harassed recently by a small number of fishermen.

“I swam down to the botton of the channel, gave the turtle a big bear hug, and brought him up,” said Mike Curtis of MBC Applied Environmental Sciences of Costa Mesa.

“I didn’t expect to find him. But there he was.”

The 44-pound juvenile turtle was then transported to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, where the animal’s health is being examined. The turtle appears to have a wound on its left front flipper, says Lance Adams, the aquarium’s veterinarian. (The image shows Perry Hampton, director of animal husbandry, and Colleen McLaughlin, a veterinary technician, placing the turtle in a holding tank.)

Curtis says the turtle, which measures 21 inches in length, also had at least a couple of hook marks from fishing lines.

“Most of the fisherman are really good and wouldn’t hurt an animal like this,” Curtis says. “But a couple had been trying to snag it.”

(Click Here to watch video of a different sea turtle in the same area.)

The turtle wandered into a cooling channel, which serves the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s Haynes Generating station, along the San Gabriel River in Seal Beach, just east of Pacific Coast Highway.

Dan Lawson, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Long Beach, says the turtle appears to belong to a small colony of green sea turtles that have taken up residence in the river.

“It’s the northern-most colony of green sea turtles that we know of,” Lawson said.

LADWP hired Curtis’ firm to rescue the turtle, partly because there were reports that the animal was being harassed. There also was concern that the animal might accidentally get snagged by fishing lines.

The rescue comes about two months before the aquarium is to begin formally exploring the colony of turtles lingering more than a mile from the river’s mouth.