The stories of the sea are hidden from us
Below the shifting surface, a blue world exists
Secret journeys are underway on invisible blue highways
And an odyssey is beginning
200 million years ago turtles lived on land
When the dinosaurs came they ran away to the sea and became creatures of the tides and the currents
But the land did not want to let them go and demanded payment
So it is that every sea turtle must return to the land to lay its eggs
And every baby turtle must start its life buried alive.
She has been digging for three days to reach the surface
Her shell is still soft and she is no bigger than the palm of a child's hand
With no teeth; no defenses; she has only her will.
The sea is just 40 metres away.
But for her, so small, the beach is a great divide.
She is not alone.
Every year from the start of spring nearly two million loggerhead turtles are born on the beaches of Florida.
Sbe has only one thought ... To escape.
The land is not her place.
She has just minutes to reach the sea.
Minutes to live or die.
From the land and the air, hundreds of hatchlings are taken.
With all her might she confronts the waves.
But many are thrown back by the surf.
As many as half can perish in the first hours of their life.
She keeps going.
With flippers the size of butterfly wings she pulls herself free of land's hold and into the unknown abyss of the sea.
Now she is a pilgrim in a vast Atlantic Ocean and has begun one of the greatest journeys on the planet.
But she will never forget where she was born.
All around her the new world of the sea changes and flows ... Liquid and elemental.
She keeps swimming for two days and two nights.
Then the water suddenly turns a clear crystal blue.
She's reached the winding edge of the Gulf Stream, a powerful current flowing up from the Caribbean all the way to the North Atlantic.
A great warm river moving with a flow 130 times that of the Amazon.
This will be her pathway through the ocean just as it has been for generations of loggerheads before her.
She pushes on, deep into the flowing heart of the Gulf Stream.
And every few minutes she must come to the surface. Like all reptiles the little turtle must breathe air.
After more than seventy kilometres, she finds what she is looking for.
A raft of seaweed ... A life raft.
And for the first time in her life, she surrenders to sleep.
Now she belongs to the arms of the great current.
For hundreds of kilometres along the Gulf Stream, the rafts of sargassum weed carry thousands of little nurseries northward.
There is no turning back.
Other journeys are underway.
The Gulf Stream is the ocean's great highway.
Each spring the sea's restless nomads travel fast and far on the current's flow,
Heading to the North Atlantic's feeding grounds in time for summer.
The humpback has come from the Caribbean.
She has made this journey a dozen times in her life.
And is heading even further north than the others ... To the Arctic, 7000 kilometres away.
But the tiny turtle has the most incredible journey of all.
She can only travel at the speed of her raft ... Eight kilometres an hour ... The speed of the Gulf Stream current.
She must trust in her past ... In all the many millions of years ... turtles just like her have swum
for the safety of the open sea to be carried inevitably across the mighty Atlantic.
For now, the raft is her whole world.
And she'd like to claim it all for herself.
But there are others who were here before her.
Schools of fish that gather for shelter and food.
And those who spend their entire lives inside the tangled weed.
And who cannot exist without it.
Like travellers in a circus caravan, each one is different.
A little odd ... A little awkward ...
A little magic.
And they are all hungry.
The seahorse favours tiny shrimp.
Which reminds her ... she's hungry too.
There is room for everyone.
However strange.
And if it starts to get crowded ...
Vacancies do come up.
But they are her travelling companions now.
And in the vast expanse of blue, the raft is their only retreat.
But the long weed lines attract others from the deep.
She is a blue shark, young and hungry.
For the first few years of her life, she has been cruising in and out of the Gulf Stream. Raiding the rafts.
One day they will meet again.
For both share the same journey through the ocean.
Below her the sea descends, falling into the abyss.
A place that has forgotten sunlight.
A place that makes its own stars.
Darkness loving creatures rise towards her to sift the Gulf Stream water for microscopic food.
This nightly movement to the surface is the largest migration on earth.
And from the Caribbean to Florida, coral reefs cast their spawn into the current just as plants release their seeds upon the wind
Such a flotsam of life is loosened into the Gulf Stream
Everything that can not move itself is lifted and taken, channeled and directed north.
But there are eddies lurking on the edge of the current ... Exit ramps into the unforgiving Atlantic
And those not strong to choose their own direction might find themselves suddenly abandoned
As dawn approaches, the night drifters sink downwards, shunning all light but their own ... Going with the flow.
The little turtle sleeps on, trusting in the sea ... For it has brought her safely this far.
She cannot know that an eddy has caught her raft, stolen it out of the Gulf Stream
And while so many others will continue their journeys north, she awakens to the sudden stillness of the Sargasso Sea
3000 kilometres wide, it is a stagnant sea in the middle of the North Atlantic
Without wind or current, the sailing ships of old were often marooned here for months.
But today's ships don't need the wind and the current.
The creatures of the raft were not magic after all, but small and fragile.
Only the little turtle can survive without the raft.
Alone now, she swims deeper and deeper into the stillness ... Further and further from the Gulf Stream.
What drifts into the Sargasso Sea seldom leaves.
The oil left by ships willl be here for years.
There is no tide to wash and cleanse the trails of blackness.
Oil chokes young turtles.
And what the land discards, also collects here.
How shiny it is ... How tempting to a hungry turtle ...
And if she swallows it, she could die.
Her hunger possesses her ... She forgets everything but her need for food ... Even her fear ...
Delicate veils sway gently in the water and lure her in.
The tentacles of the Portugese man of war are venemous.
They stun their victims, envelop and absorb them.
But after sharing the ocean with them for so many millions of years
the turtles have developed an immunity to their stings And a taste for their rubbery tentacles.
At last, she is not just prey but predator.
And now that she knows the rules, there's plenty to eat.
Years pass in this forgotten sea but what does a turtle care for a few lost chapters.
Time for her is centuries, millennia.
Her ancestors saw the continents form more than 200 million years ago.
They survived the great cataclysms of asteroids and glaciers.
They outlived their old foes the dinosaurs.
Time is for her to grow strong. For her shell to harden and her skin to thicken.
And so she becomes an ocean traveller.
Close to her fifth birthday, when she is nearly half a metre long,
she suddenly charts a course away from the Sargasso sea.
As if her ancestors have reminded her. Her flippers like wings were made for travelling, not for staying.
And she swims, sure and strong now.
After several months she rejoins the Gulf Stream in time for the spring migration north.
At last she can continue her journey on the great current.
She takes her place among the other travellers of the blue highway.
The blue shark is here too.
But the turtle is no longer afraid of her.
She is bigger now and her shell much harder.
And the shark, now pregnant, is riding the Gulf Stream to the other side of the atlantic where she will give birth.
It's a journey she will make every two or three years for the rest of her life.
How fast and sure the blue shark swims ... And how a young turtle might envy such confidence.
Nearly 2,500 kilometres from her beach, she approaches the wild waters of the North Atlantic.
Far out at sea, a spring storm brews.
It sweeps toward the coast of Nova Scotia.
Waves, bigger than whales, bigger than ships.
In just a few days they carry her several hundred kilometres northeast along her path.
But the storm follows a different course to that of the Gulf Stream
and takes her like a captive toward the shore.
Exhausted, she can not catch her breath enough to dive below the battering waves.
She is thrown towards the rocks.
Land reaches out to reclaim her ... As if it has never forgiven her for leaving.
The jagged shores of Nova Scotia will smash her shell open.
They have claimed many turtles before.
Sailors and fishermen too have died here.
Only the lucky survive to continue their journeys.
The storm has blown her off course but she is not lost.
A turtle is never lost.
Using the magnetic lines of the earth that run from north to south like invisible wires, she can determine her location anywhere in the sea.
She has within her not just a compass but a map of the ocean world.
And a resolve to follow the path chosen by her ancestors
The safest passage they could find through a perilous ocean to a distant and unknown destination.
After only a few days, she is back in the flow of the Gulf Stream.
She rides it even further north in time for summer.
Almost 4000 kilometres north of Florida, she reaches the Grand Banks
Halfway between Canada and Europe a cold current from the Arctic collides with the warmth of the Gulf Stream
and stirs up a dense brew of nutrients from the sea floor.
Creatures of the cold north glide through the fog towards her.
Basking sharks sweep up reams of plankton.
Solitary molar tour for jellyfish.
Maybe the blue shark is here too ... Slipping through the jade coloured water like a secret friend.
Now she fears another silent predator ... Winter
The water is getting colder and colder.
Icy eddies reach into the Gulf Stream.
Her reptile heart begins to slow.
Here the humpbacks leave the Gulf Stream and turn north towards the Arctic.
Protected by their thick blubber, they can cope with the freezing water.
As their songs fade, the cold whispers to her ... And promises her sleep.
But then the sky lights up as if to remind her she must listen to only herself ...
To the knowledge she was born with
This play of fire and light is charged by the earth's magnetic field
and it is this invisible chord of energy that guides her safely through the winter and across the North Atlantic.
By the beginning of her sixth year, she has travelled more than seven thousand kilometres
from her beach towards the coast of Europe.
Even though she has never been here before, she knows the way.
Unwavering in her sense of direction, she leaves the Gulf Stream and bears south on the Canaries current, towards Africa.
Towards warm seas.
Towards the summer of the Azores islands.
From the ocean floor to the top of their peaks, the Azores are some of the tallest mountains in the world
1900 kilometres west of Africa, it is the great crossroads of the Atlantic.
And every summer the sea's wanderers big, small, fast and slow converge for a celebration of life and plenty.
Shoals of fish swim together tighter and tighter into a whirling bait haul.
A feast.
She is not quick enough to join in the main event but she can catch the stragglers.
The blue shark has made it too though perhaps a little faster than the turtle
She has chosen to give birth in these waters for she was born her seven years ago
And now she can rest before beginning her journey back across the Atlantic.
Pods of female sperm whales stay here for most of the year, raising their young in the deep water.
And in the summer the males come all the way from the Arctic to mate.
They are the ocean's deepest divers and can descend more than three kilometres in search of giant squid.
But even they can't reach the bottom here.
Along the shallower shore of the Azores she finds a retreat from her years in the open sea
A confident adolescent sixty centimetres long, she can now hold her breath for up to half an hour.
And with a sharp beak and powerful jaw she's now capable of eating more than jellyfish.
It's been a long time since those first terrifying minutes of her life.
Finally she has her revenge.
It's crunchy and very sweet.
She's not the only one to have savoured the taste of crab.
Other young loggerheads have made it too.
Some managed to ride the Gulf Stream current directly all the way from Florida.
They have been here for years.
And maybe others have explored the ocean as far as the Mediterranean and Spain.
And there may even be one from her beach.
The days shorten.
September slips across the sky.
And the turtle chooses once again her solitary way.
With summer's end a great exodus begins.
The male sperm whales leave for the Arctic.
Others follow different pathways, their own ancestral routes, invisible but indelible.
The secret blue highways of the sea lead every creature to its destiny.
And that takes the turtle south towards the equator.
Once there was the fearsome mosasaur and the terrasaurs with their claws and teeth.
They have long gone.
Now the long lines uncoil.
And the man made hooks glitter.
Each year more than a billion hooks are cast to reap the sea.
The hook pierces her mouth.
The lines pull her to the surface.
Every year, tens of thousands of turtles die from long lines.
Were it not for a single act of kindness, so would she.
For the shark, for her, only her fins are taken.
Her silver body will never again flash and stream through the depths and shallows.
Ghosts haunt the empty seas.
Ghosts of whales, of dolphins and sharks.
Ghosts of all we have taken.
Now there are not enough left to eat the jellyfish.
We have asked too much of the sea.
The turtle only knows to keep swimming, to stay her course.
She crosses back over the Atlantic on the Equatorial Current.
And within only four months she reaches her destination ...
The islands of the Caribbean.
Coral fans welcome her in.
Meadows of coral.
And reefs of fish.
So much flourishes in the Caribbean's steady seasons.
And she becomes a part of this. A citizen of the turquoise and sapphire sea.
Her ancestors traced their long route through the sea
So that she would arrive her only when she was big enough to look after herself
With her powerful jaws, she can now crack open the hardest of shells.
And she won't hesitate to give a three metre long lemon shark a nasty bite.
If she had come here before now, she would never have survived.
In her blue submarine world she could not know what was happening above the surface
She could not know of the great warming of the earth and the rising of the sea.
But her ancestors have seen far greater changes and survived them all.
They have seen so many of our planet's creatures come and go.
Whatever whisper from the distant past brought her here asks her to wait
For fifteen years
And when she reaches her 21st year ... A new and insistent yearning stirs.
Now a magnificent adult more than a metre long and a metre wide, she leaves the Caribbean.
She passes the humpbacks that give birth in the shallow waters around the reefs.
For it is spring.
And it is her time now.
The invisible lines are still there for her to read.
She swims out to a familiar highway ... To the Gulf Stream.
The life stream.
She passes the rafts that gave her sanctuary all those years ago.
And the great spring migration.
She leaves the Gulf Stream and turns west into the shallow outlying waters.
The road that took her away all those years ago, now brings her back.
Other loggerhead turtles have survived.
He too has swum the great arc through the sea and returned here.
Without each other, their journeys, their lives, would be in vain.
They are the precious survivors.
Just one in ten thousand make it this far.
But their lives are not for sharing
And this last part of the journey is most especially hers to complete alone.
Now she uses not so much her ancestral memory to guide her but her own.
For she has been here before ... More than twenty years and 10,000 kilometres ago.
She finds a very different land to the one she left behind.
Defences built to protect the land from the rising sea
Must seem to her a maze of strange, dead reefs blocking her way.
Having fought so hard to escape the land, she now fights to return.
This time the surf carries her in.
Tall new shadows and their false stars now crowd the land.
But her beach is still here.
It has been protected.
All her life has been preparation for this moment.
Six thousand times her hatchling size, she has returned to the beach where she was born.
And for this night she trades her sea grace for land's gravity.
She digs a hole half a metre deep.
And pays her debt to the land.
This ancient offering is the purpose of her journey ... of her whole life.
She is a mother.
She has triumphed.
For more than half a century, she will continue to live in the Caribbean
Returning here every two or three years to lay her eggs.
She will not be the one to break this ancient chain of life.