Freedom Turtle, from the Summer-to-Summer Super Swimathon. We're heading the South Pacific Gyre. It doesn't have a terrific supply of food, but it's steady and we don't have to constantly fight a strong current. Yeah, we're big and powerful, but big beautiful turtles like us have to conserve our energy! Besides, we don't want to muss up our hair. (Okay, okay, okay. Bad joke. Leatherbacks don't have hair. Or eyelashes.)

The South Pacific Gyre isn't like the waters close to the coast of South America, where the Humboldt Current brings cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface. That current, which flows from Chile toward Peru, is the world's most productive ecosystem (that's what my friends at the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration say...and you thought it was the Amazon rainforest!!). Here's a map of the gyre that was put together by NASA's SEAWIFS and SIMBIOS projects.

About 18-20 percent of the world's fish catch comes from the Humboldt Current and it's possible that some of us gals and our brothers use this current a lot too.....But, for our group of females, after we leave the beach where we laid our eggs, we head to what's called the world's largest ocean desert, a high-risk area (thanks to commercial fisheries that we encounter along the way) the size of a continent -- it stretches from South America to New Zealand. That's not to say there isn't food there...it just distributed in patches, so we have to cruise around a bit to find dinner. Heck, the water temperature is pretty comfortable for us, too. We're not roasting like we were up around the equator. In the South Pacific Ocean, near Lima.