Thirty Years of Dawn Patrols: The Turtle Guardians of Koh Phra Thong Have Good News to Share

At first light on Koh Phra Thong, the beach is a page and the turtles have already written on it. Before the heat arrives, small teams of volunteers and local villagers walk the island's long western shore reading the sand — a curved line of flipper tracks here, a soft mound of thrown sand there — the morning news of a sea turtle that came ashore in the dark. They have been making this dawn patrol in one form or another since 1996, and after thirty years, the story the beach is telling them keeps getting better.

An island made for turtles

Koh Phra Thong — the name means "Golden Buddha Island," after an old local tale of pirates who buried a stolen golden statue somewhere in its dunes and never came back for it — sits off the Phang Nga coast, a short hop north of Khao Lak and close to the Surin Islands. It is one of Thailand's last genuinely quiet islands, fringed by more than 15 kilometres of largely uninhabited white sand [ref:5].

That empty shoreline is exactly what nesting turtles look for. And the sea around the island is generous in other ways too: seagrass meadows that drew a dugong sighting in 2025, and reefs so healthy that the nearby Surin Islands are home to four turtle species of their own [ref:1][ref:5].

Thirty years of simply showing up

The constant heart of it all is Naucrates, a conservation project that began on the island in 1996 and has just marked its thirtieth year — an anniversary celebrated this May in Valdobbiadene, Italy, by many of the volunteers and supporters who have kept it alive [ref:1].

The work is unglamorous by design. Every field season, which runs each year from January to March, international volunteers live alongside the island's communities and walk the beaches daily with the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR), monitoring nests, collecting scientific data, and protecting nesting sites of green turtles, leatherbacks and olive ridley turtles [ref:1]. No drama, no rescue helicopters — just notebooks, bamboo markers, and thirty years of patient walking.

The numbers are moving the right way

Thailand's coasts host five of the planet's seven sea turtle species, and on the Andaman side the calendar belongs to different mothers in turn: leatherbacks and olive ridleys in the October-to-February window, green turtles from March to July [ref:2][ref:4]. Sea turtles have been protected under Thai national law since 1947 — one of the older protections in the region [ref:2].

Against that backdrop, the news from Koh Phra Thong is genuinely encouraging. During the 2024–2025 nesting season, the team — working with the local community and DMCR — recorded an increased number of nests, a change in the year-on-year trend that the project describes as the payoff of long-term conservation: the island's nesting population is stable and rising [ref:2]. On a beach where every season is counted one nest at a time, that is a milestone worth waking up at dawn for.

A museum that tells the whole story

All those years of data live somewhere concrete: the island's little nature museum, Ban Tao, which has shared the project's stories and educated thousands of visitors since 1996. But three decades of tropical sun and monsoon rain have worn the building down, so Naucrates has launched a campaign to relocate and rebuild it as a new Nature Conservation and Information Centre. The fundraiser — open to anyone who loves this coast — had reached €4,255 of its €15,000 goal from 36 donations at last count [ref:3].

It is a fitting next chapter: the turtles came back, and now the house of their stories gets to come back too.

See it for yourself

Koh Phra Thong is reached by boat from the Khuraburi side of Phang Nga, and the season around February and March is when the Andaman's turtles are most active nearby — the same window divers prize for manta rays and whale sharks at Richelieu Rock, one of the world's celebrated dive sites just offshore [ref:5]. Walk the beach early, look for tracks, and leave them be: somewhere under that mound of sand, next season is already being counted.