"Pull! Pull!" Scott Dexter shouts the cadence as eight men grip a rope on the Navarre Beach Fishing Pier, hoisting a 172-pound loggerhead sea turtle named Bowser some 35 feet above the Gulf of Mexico. What unfolds is a rescue choreographed through years of repetition and urgency—a moment that reveals both the fragility of sea turtles and the fierce commitment of the people who save them.
Bowser was foul-hooked in his left front flipper by a fisherman just after 6 p.m. on a Sunday evening. Scott and Cheri Dexter, already stationed on the pier as part of a volunteer rotation, sprang into action alongside the angler who had inadvertently caught the turtle. The team worked to keep the fishing line taut while guiding the thrashing animal into a five-foot-diameter net. Fishermen and nearby observers joined in, pulling with the specialized hoist that Scott Dexter designed and built specifically for these rescues. Within 25 minutes, they had hauled Bowser onto the pier, cut the line near the hook, and loaded him onto a Kawasaki UTV despite his desperate attempts to escape.
"That's a good sign," Cheri Dexter said after the rescue, noting that Bowser's vigorous thrashing indicated he was healthy and fighting. A lethargic turtle would have signaled serious injury.
What makes Bowser's rescue remarkable is not the spectacle of eight men pulling rope, but the system behind it. The Dexters lead a team of 26 certified volunteers who have trained extensively through the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to conduct turtle rescues and transport animals to approved rehabilitation facilities. Bowser was the 26th turtle rescue of 2026 from the pier alone; the 27th came just two days later. Last year, the center rescued 59 turtles from the pier, mainly loggerheads and green sea turtles, with most entanglements occurring during nesting season from May to October.
Navarre Beach, a small community in the Florida Panhandle between Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach, is home to Florida's longest fishing pier at 1,545 feet—and that distinction comes with a steep price. From 2000 to 2022, Santa Rosa County, where Navarre Beach is located, accounted for 56 percent of all fishing pier entanglements reported on Florida's Gulf Coast, 254 of 452 cases. Every documented turtle incident at the county's only large pier between 2014 and 2022 occurred at Navarre Beach. Statewide, the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network reported 503 strandings in Florida last year due to incidental fishing capture alone.
Yet there is hope in the numbers. Of turtles rescued during that eight-year period, 85 percent were successfully rehabilitated and released back into the Gulf. Scott Dexter estimates that about 38 percent of turtles hooked at the Navarre Beach pier can be rescued before breaking the line and swimming away with potentially fatal fishing gear still embedded.
Loggerheads like Bowser and green sea turtles are the most common species in these waters, but they share the pier with Kemp's ridley, the most imperiled of all sea turtle species—fewer than 1,000 breeding females remain in the world. The volunteers at Navarre Beach are not solving the larger crisis facing these ancient mariners, but they are offering something equally vital: a second chance, one rescued turtle at a time.