PANAMA CITY BEACH — Of the nearly 3,000 sea turtles that hatched on Panama City Beach’s shore this fall, approximately 70 percent headed in the wrong direction, crawling towards street and building lights instead of the ocean.

“Our volunteers were able to rescue most of them,” said Kennard Watson, the director of PCB Turtle Watch.

The news was mixed this hatching season. On one hand, there were 51 loggerhead turtle nests, the best the program has seen since it started in 1991. On the other hand, storms flooded or washed 20 nests, according to Watson, and it was clear turtles are still struggling with man-made obstacles.

In one case, a nest was laid too close to the water as a row of lounge chairs blocked the turtle’s path to higher ground. Volunteers were able to move the nest.

Panama City Beach already has a leave no trace ordinance on the books aimed at preventing incidences like the chair encounter, and the city passed an ordinance in 2013 requiring beachfront property owners to use turtle friendly lighting.

“We need to continue to encourage compliance with the ordinance,” Watson said.

Grant money, he added, is available through the Sea Turtle Conservancy beachfront property owners looking to improve their lighting.

The way it works is the Conservancy will assess the lights on the property, develop a new lighting plan and pay for all the new fixtures using money from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The property owner has to pay for the installation.

“It’s going to be a little darker, but it will be within safety codes,” said Lauryn Wright, a light specialist with the Conservancy about how lighting changes may look.

Watson said he believes the work being done to help sea turtles restore to historic levels, from helping the babies get to the water to changing light bulbs, is helping. Though it is impossible to know if the record number of nests is a fluke or not.

“It’s going to take more years worth of data,” he said.

And it will be about another five years before PCB Turtle Watch will be able to really measure the fruits of the labor. Loggerhead turtles return to the beach they were born to lay their own eggs, but it takes about 30 years for them to mature.

“We’re going to be very patient,” Watson said.