Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Swordfish saves the day

Today, due to Cintahati’s ever-loving sweetness, I’d like to share a story with you. It was so funny, that everytime I think about it, I’ll laugh for at least the next 5 minutes. Hope you had a good laugh too.

It happened last week when I was in Johor Bahru for work. The normal water sampling yada yada. We started early; everyone was in the mood for work. We laughed our hearts out throughout the journey from Kualiti Ceria’s office to Tanjung Pelepas (about 30minutes drive). Upon arrival, we had breakfast and swallowed a little bitter pill to avoid water sickness (is that what you call it?) Whatever it is, I don’t want to throw up doing my thing on boat, and I know it’s definitely not fun being sick. So I had to take the medicine every time I go on boat even though it makes you sleepy the first 30minutes. [Note: Please get the medicine if you plan on taking the boat, ferry or such]

So after a while of boat-riding, we arrived at the spot (advised by Mr. GPS as we need an exact reading of the location) so we started to throw the Ekman grab for the sediment sample. When the boys pulled it up, they noticed that there’s a malfunction. To say the least, the next hour was spent repairing it on boat, the nomad way. Such chaos! “Tu la, sape suruh gelak je dari tadi, kan dah kena!” is all I can think of.

To make it more dramatic, when the apparatus was ready to do its job, Roro started doing the Phytoplankton and Zooplankton sampling. Another tragedy happened when the net was stucked to the boat’s fan. The boatmen even wanted to dive and get it out, but by the time he was in his diving costume, and got the torn net and there’s nothing left to dive for.

Due to the drama that was happening, everyone was exhausted, moody and I was easily agitated. I sat outside the boat, alone, while he smoked his way out of depression. He was stressed about the net and could not get it out of him since he was responsible for it but Edros said that things were to happen and nothing can be done but to get a new one. So I was okay with it as the net wont cost more than 10 grants would it?

So since both of us were not in the mood, me, being super-agitated with his stress-ness tried to make him relax but turned out fighting and screaming our hearts out (I’m definitely exaggerating), we got into a fight with no reasons at all. Then as we were heading back towards the jetty, the next 20minutes was pure silent between the two of us until I saw a swordfish, in and out of the water.

I was amazed and excited that I wanted to shake him and ask him to look what I saw and since we were ‘not’ talking, I didn’t. I kept it to myself. But Cintahati, quickly turned to me and said “Did you see that? I turned back just to make sure the swordfish was not there to stab me”. I laughed. I thought it was funny that he was being dramatic. But I recalled that there’s this old folk story made to a black-and-white movie “Singapura dilanggar Todak” where the villagers were stabbed by the swordfish. But luckily these Swordfishes are civilized now as Swordfish saves the day!

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