Weathermen are not the only ones confused by this year’s unseasonably warm winter weather. Off the Cape and Islands, this winter more than 100 sea turtles, tempted to linger in the balmy waters, have met a cold and sandy end.

“This year I’ve seen more turtle strandings than I’ve ever seen in my 12 years here,” Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary director Suzan Bellincampi said on Thursday.

Cold, stunned and stranded describes more than just the Vineyarders who got stuck on or off-Island in last weekend’s storm. There was another visitor that was also powerless to get to its destination.

Though Sunday brought the sun and an eventual resumption of ferry service, one Island guest needed a little assistance to get on its way.

The long journey of a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle named Shellbey came to a sad end early this month, when the turtle was found dead in an isolation tank at its temporary home at the University of New England’s Marine Animal Rehabilitation Center in Biddeford, Me.

Fortunately the family that found the turtle washed up on the Vineyard’s north shore shortly after Thanksgiving last year got one last chance to see Shellbey, when they visited the rehabilitation center in January.

Compared with the distance it had already come, the little turtle’s voyage from Martha’s Vineyard to Woods Hole was short. The only unusual thing was, it went by ferry.

Shellbey, the juvenile Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle, was in bad shape, you see. Made lethargic by cold and battered by the weekend’s storm, it was washed up injured on the Island’s north shore.