Sea Turtle Season on Tybee Island: The Ossie Release & How to Help (Sep 26, 2026)

Ossie is a loggerhead. She was rescued as a hatchling on Ossabaw Island in 2023, spent three years as an education animal at the Tybee Island Marine Science Center, and now weighs close to 36 pounds. On Saturday, September 26 she goes back into the Atlantic off North Beach with a satellite tag on her shell.

That tag is the part worth planning around. Most wildlife you see on a vacation is a moment you tell people about later. Ossie is a moment you can keep checking on from home.

We're posting this ten days out for three practical reasons: the release is free, it needs no registration, and it sits at the opposite end of the island from us. Each one changes how you'd plan the morning.

The release: Saturday, September 26, 10 to 11 a.m.

The Marine Science Center is putting Ossie back in the water on the beach in front of the Center Street crossover, in the North Beach parking lot. The window is 10 to 11 a.m. It's open to the public, there's no registration, and no admission fee is listed for it.

One scheduling wrinkle catches people out. The Science Center building opens late that day, at 11 a.m., so this isn't a tour-then-turtle morning. The release comes first. If you want the exhibits, they're what you do afterward, and you'll be walking in as the doors open.

The Center encourages homemade signs, which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone of the morning.

As with any outdoor event built around a live animal, check the Center's channels the morning of before you drive up. What nobody can tell you either way is how big the crowd will be. Attendance isn't published, and a free morning event with a named animal and a satellite tracker has obvious pull. Treat "arrive early" as insurance rather than advice you can safely ignore. The Center hasn't published a viewing layout either, so the workable plan is to get to the crossover with time in hand and stand where staff put you.

Who Ossie is, and why the tracker matters

Three years is a long stretch for an education animal, and it's the reason this release has a name attached to it rather than being a line in a report. Ossie came off Ossabaw Island as a hatchling in 2023 and has been at the Center since. Nearly 36 pounds is a substantial young loggerhead.

The satellite tracker is provided through Sea Life with Liddy, Liddy Clever's nonprofit. The Center has said it will post weekly tracking updates to its social channels and website after she goes. Which means the ten minutes you spend on the sand on the 26th turn into a map you can pull up in October, in December, from wherever you live.

A release is a short event by nature. An animal goes into the water and the water takes her. The tracking afterward is the part with real length to it, and following it costs nothing.

Getting there: the north end is a drive, not a walk

The Marine Science Center sits at 37 Meddin Drive, in the old Fort Screven district at the island's north end. From the Tybrisa Street hub down at South Beach, that's a couple of miles. Tybee is small enough that people assume everything is walkable from everywhere. It isn't, and this is one of the trips that proves it.

Bike it, take a golf cart up the side streets, or drive. Our car-free guide to Tybee has the honest version of what each of those involves, including the Highway 80 rule that keeps carts off Butler Avenue except at four crossing points.

Parking is the paid North Beach lot, by kiosk or the ParkTYB app. Public parking on Tybee is paid everywhere on the island, every day of the year, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.: $4.00 an hour or $25 for a day pass, and the city no longer takes cash. If the release is the whole errand, pay for the hour and go. If you're making a north-end morning of it with the Science Center afterward, do the arithmetic before you tap.

The same lot serves the beach and the Center, so it isn't only release traffic you're competing with on a warm late-September Saturday.

Why late September is the right month for this

The Georgia coast's nesting season opens May 1, and the Center describes the season as running May through October. A nest takes roughly 50 to 75 days to hatch. Do that math from the early nests and hatchlings start emerging around July, then keep coming through the late season. September is squarely hatch season, not the tail end of a summer story.

This year gives it extra weight. 2026 was Tybee's biggest nesting season on record, past the old record of 35 nests by midsummer and still climbing. Statewide, Georgia topped 4,110 nests, the most since 1989, when surveys expanded to cover all the barrier-island beaches. The species doing it here is the loggerhead, the same species as Ossie.

So the beach you're standing on for the release is a working nesting beach with eggs still in it. That's not a framing device. It's the reason the next section exists.

How to help, in the four things the Center actually asks

From the Marine Science Center:

• Flatten sandcastles and fill in your holes before you leave the sand. A hole that's a good afternoon for you is a trap for a nesting female or a hatchling heading for the water.
• Take all your trash off the beach. All of it.
• Turn off lights and close blinds at beachfront properties after dark. Artificial light disorients hatchlings, which navigate toward the brightest horizon.
• Use a red-light flashlight if you're on the beach at night.

City ordinance adds two more that visitors routinely trip over: dogs are not allowed on the beach at any time of year, and glass is not allowed on the sand at all.

The lights rule deserves a note about where we sit, because it's the one that gets recited without much thought. We're steps from South Beach rather than on it, at 16 Tybrisa Street, so our windows aren't the ones a hatchling is reading as a horizon. The rule bites hardest on beachfront rentals with a wall of glass facing the Atlantic. What does apply to anyone staying anywhere on this island is the flashlight in your hand on an evening beach walk. In September, on a record nesting year, switch it to red or leave it in your bag.

The excavation you can't put on a calendar

The Center's nest excavations are the other thing people ask about in turtle season, and the honest answer is that you cannot plan around one. Excavations only get scheduled after a nest hatches. They're announced on the Center's Facebook page during the season, and they fill fast. There's no advance date to book, no seasonal calendar, no way for us or anyone else to promise you one during your stay.

What is published is the shape of the program: from $25 for adults and from $22 for children 5 to 17, under 4 free, ages 6 and up, capped at 15 participants, running about an hour and a half, with anyone under 18 accompanied by a paid adult. Details and current pricing live on the Marine Science Center's excavation page.

If you want a shot at one, the mechanism is simple and unglamorous: follow their Facebook page before and during your trip, check it in the afternoons, and be ready to book the moment something posts. Anything more organized than that is someone selling you certainty they don't have.

The rest of that Saturday

The 26th is the busiest morning on the island's September calendar, and the two things worth knowing about sit at opposite ends of it. While Ossie is going into the water at North Beach from 10 to 11, the pier at 1 Tybrisa Street is running the 15th Annual Gage Ochsner Kids Fishing & Water Safety Event from 9 a.m. to noon, free, with registration through the Chatham County Aquatic Center. The overlap is real, and the two are a couple of miles apart. Pick one or plan the drive tightly.

Our September events roundup has the rest of the month, including what's on at the Post Theater that weekend and the Monday farmers market behind the lighthouse. For everything that isn't date-stamped, the things to do page covers the island end to end.

Where to stay for it

Here's the trade, stated plainly. Basing yourself in the South Beach hub means the release is a drive rather than a stroll. What you get back is every other hour of that weekend on foot: the pier at the end of the street, the widest stretch of sand at the end of the block, and the island's densest run of restaurants and bars within a block or two of your room.

Our guests park free on site, one car per room, which is the meter you're not feeding for the rest of the stay even though North Beach will still cost you an hour at the kiosk on Saturday. Three room types, a seasonal outdoor saltwater pool, free Wi-Fi. If two or three nights suit the trip better than one, our special offers take 10% off two nights and 15% off three.

One last thing about the release, and it's the thing to hold onto if the morning turns out crowded or the sightline is bad. A loggerhead rescued off Ossabaw as a hatchling in 2023 is going back into the Atlantic under her own power with a transmitter on her shell, in the biggest nesting season Tybee has recorded. You don't need a front-row view for that to be worth setting an alarm.

Planning around the 26th? Check availability.