“Should be releasing him in a few, which is damn good, for a lot of reasons,” Klemens says to me. “You can see how low we are.”

The dive platform is level with the bay because of the weight of the turtle and the rescuers attending to it, water rolling around them as the boat lifts and settles on swells.

“Rated for twenty-five hundred pounds and maxed out, never seen anything like the size of this one,” Klemens says. “We run into entanglements and strandings all the time, and it’s almost always too late, but this one’s got a real good chance. What a monster.”

Klemens balances himself against the tender, a rigid-inflatable rescue RIB with a gray tube hull and a 60-horsepower engine. I note that on the other side and still under its red tarp is the A-frame and hydraulic winch that can be used to retrieve people or other deadweight from the water, including a monster turtle. Obviously the winch isn’t what got this creature on board, I remark to Klemens, and I’m not surprised. Whether it’s an eight-hundred-pound gray seal or a huge loggerhead or dolphin, marine rescuers won’t run the risk of causing further injury and typically refuse the help of a winch.

“Anything that might cause the slightest transfer of trace evidence or artifacts.” I remind Klemens I need to know everything that’s been done.

“Well, I don’t think the turtle killed anyone,” he says, with mock seriousness.

“Probably not, but all the same.”

“No machinery was used,” he confirms. “Of course, my feeling about it is if we can sling human beings on board without hurting them, we sure as hell can do a turtle. But they did it their usual way, pulled him in close, harnessed him, got a ramp under him, and inflated the float bag. Then it took all of them and us to pull him on the platform. That was after they got his flippers restrained, obviously. He gets going with those things, he could tear the damn boat apart and knock a few of us into last year.”

I direct his attention to a yellow boat fender. Not far from the boat, it’s attached to a buoy line, and I ask if that was what the turtle was entangled with. I notice that nothing has been cleated off.

“Nope,” he says. “Some kind of fishing gear, possibly snoods from a longline or a trolling line that got wrapped around his left-front flipper.”

“He wasn’t entangled with the same line the body is attached to?” I don’t understand.

“Not directly. What he got wrapped up in was about fifty feet of monofilament lines, three of them, and wire leaders with rusty hooks. I’m guessing the rig got free of its fisherman float at some point, drifted on the current, and got snagged up with that buoy line.”

He points to the one attached to the yellow boat fender.

“And then the turtle got snagged in the fishing line. But like I said, that’s just a guess,” Klemens says. “We won’t know until everything’s recovered, and I’m assuming it will be you doing that?”