Semakau, TeamSeagrass final monitoring for 2007

Its a bright sunny day and the seagrassers gathered at Marina South Pier, all excited to embark on the last monitoring trip for this year. They all waited and waited for this one very very late seagrasser to arrive - ME!

And so we set out on what seemed to be an extremely long boat ride to Semakau and for some strange reason, everyone needed to relieve themselves when we set foot on the island (note: Ria says to do it at the pier next time to save time and trouble).

I was assigned to site 1 transect 1 which was the furthest away as a punishment for being late. So my partners and I walked all the way to the end of the shoreline just to find that we cannot locate our stake. So Weiling tried to help by using the GPS and talking to Siti through the walkie and finally we found it (all thanks to technology).

At the meantime, we spotted this really cool looking sea anemone

So we laid out the 50m transect line and started the monitoring as we had a lot to catch up on except for poor Andy who couldn't find the tape bag and had to wait for Ron to finish so that he could start.


Oh and did I mention that the Enhalus were blooming? There were lots of the styrofoam looking male flowers everywhere. What a good sight to behold on our last trip! Its too bad I was so engrossed with the monitoring that I forgot to take a picture of them so those who caught pictures please do post them here!

It was about half an hour more till we had to leave and everyone is done and exploring our rubbish dump island. It seemed that the starfish were also "blooming" with all the procreation going around. Here are some photos of the seagrassers in action:








I've also managed to get some close shots of the tiny crabs that scamper around our feet as I brought along my long lens. Love those long pointy eyes...



There was also some live firing going on at a nearby island and we were jolted to our feet when the huge KAPOW sent shockwaves (ok, that was a little to exaggerated). In no time, the seagrassers were all caught up with photographing the huge cloud of smoke.


But it wasn't long till the sun began to set and we had to move out before the tide comes in. We took some last photos and you can see Siti in the background waving to the others to pack up and scram.


It was a good last trip for TeamSeagrass and we sure had accomplished a lot this year. So on behalf of TeamSeagrass, a big THANKS to all volunteers, coordinators, boat captains who had helped us make this a huge success. Hope to see everyone again next year!

Thanks to all who came for the monitoring session: Andy, Alex, Sijie, Dawn, Dickson, Gaytri, Helen, Kah Chine, Michell, Nor Aishah, Ron, Ru Qi, Shuan Kwee, Suizlyn, Vyna, Saravanan, Chay Hoon, Sam, Jerald, Marcus, Sze Wee, Sereena and Tze Chien.