Hercules the tortoise found after 40-day Vashon adventure
Published 11:30 am Saturday, August 1, 2026
Dwight and Deb McCabe were walking home with their dogs along Kingsbury Beach in Quartermaster Harbor on Friday, July 24, when they noticed three large, beige-colored boulders above the tide line.
Two stayed exactly where nature had left them. The one in the middle was slowly moving north.
“It was just amazing,” Deb McCabe said. “I’ve grown up on this island, and I’ve found a lot of strange things on Vashon beaches, but this takes the cake.”
As the couple got closer, the moving boulder sprouted legs, and McCabe knew immediately it didn’t belong there.
She sent Dwight ahead with their dogs while she stayed behind, falling into step beside what she realized was a 150-pound tortoise as it continued up the beach.
“He got nervous around me only once and put his head in,” McCabe said. “I said, ‘It’s OK, buddy. I’m just walking with you and keeping you company until we can get you settled.’”
She had no idea where the tortoise had come from, only that somebody, somewhere, was missing him.
Within minutes, neighbors, looky-loos and volunteers began converging on the beach. When McCabe called Haven, Vashon’s local animal shelter and rescue organization, co-founder Amy Carey knew exactly who this roaming reptile was: Hercules.
For nearly six weeks, Hercules had become one of Vashon’s most talked-about residents. His photo spread across neighborhood social media pages as islanders searched wooded trails in hopes someone would find the missing 41-year-old sulcata tortoise that had escaped from his enclosure near the southern tip of Vashon.
The most direct route would have taken him through roughly three miles of dense forest, over Burton Hills, across Vashon Highway and through Portage near Raabs Lagoon. A shoreline trek would have meant a straight shot to Magnolia Beach before wrapping around Quartermaster Harbor, where he would have encountered driftwood, bulkheads and more than 80 changing tides — all without anyone reporting a sighting.
“I don’t know how he got from one end of Vashon to the other,” McCabe said. “He must have quite the story to tell if he could talk.”
Whatever route Hercules took, he traveled around 10 miles over 40 days, about a quarter-mile each day.
The first plan to corral him lasted only a few moments. Hercules started breaking through a plastic dog crate McCabe got from home.
“Tortoises are like small bulldozers,” said Amy Carey, co-founder of Haven.
Then a large utility garden cart was tipped onto its side so Hercules could walk inside. Six island residents helped maneuver the cart through the sand, and it took four of them to lift the three-foot-long tortoise up a bulkhead and into Carey’s vehicle. The entire rescue effort took about three hours, according to McCabe.
Hercules spent the night recouping in a stall offered by Sound Stables PNW until his owner could return.
Forty days earlier, the search for Hercules began on the other side of the island. Like most of his workdays in Seattle, motion alerts from outdoor security cameras buzzed Tony So’s phone whenever his pet tortoise moved around the enclosure at their Neill Point home. That afternoon, the alerts stopped. Concerned, So checked the live camera feed and noticed one corner of the enclosure’s 12-inch-high wood barrier had been smashed open.
“Hercules is really strong,” So said.
By the time So made it back to Vashon at 9 p.m., Hercules had nearly an eight-hour head start. Even for a slow-moving reptile, that means he could have moved the length of a football field in any direction. So searched until dark and returned to the search over the next several days, looking whenever he could carve out time. So had moved to Vashon about a year earlier and had brought Hercules from their Seattle home only two weeks before the escape.
“I believe in fate,” So said. “If someone finds him, he was meant to come back. Otherwise, there was not much else I could do.”
Hercules, a land tortoise, can’t swim, although So believed he knew to stay away from water. Hercules had kept clear of the koi pond in their yard back in Seattle.
If Hercules remained missing into late fall, So feared Vashon’s thick tree roots would keep him from digging deeply enough to survive the cold.
Haven posted alerts, contacted neighbors and joined early search efforts.
As the weeks passed, So continued to check his phone, out of habit more than hope. Then, on July 24, Carey called. Hercules had been found. So was off-island at the time, and several hours passed before he could get to Sound Stables. Hercules was asleep when he arrived, his head tucked safely inside his shell.
“He knows me,” So said. “When he heard my voice, he stuck his head out.”
“He’s not a friend,” said So, now 61, who brought Hercules home as a newborn when he was just 20. “He’s a family member. I think about him and care for him every day.”
Hercules is back in his remodeled enclosure, with room to roam, platters of fruits and vegetables, and the daily routine he and So have shared for 41 years.
McCabe hopes this isn’t the last chapter in Hercules’ adventure.
She laughed as she compared him with Ballard’s internet-famous raccoon.
“Ballard has Jimothy,” McCabe said. “We’ve got Hercules — our own local celebrity.”
More than anything, she would like to see Hercules again.
“When someone just shows up in your life like that, it’s really special,” she said. “That tortoise just charmed me.”
Eddie Macsalka is a contributing reporter to The Beachcomber.
