Kayaking at Lower Seletar Reservoir

This time, our meetup was held a little bit closer to central at Lower Seletar Reservoir. It was about an hour travel from my place as it's located near Khatib MRT (in fact you get a nice view of the lake from the train)

8 of us turned up this time. Willy, Clara, Isaac, Narayana, Xavier, WM, Wee and myself. 

Lower Seletar is a little special as we get into the water from a pontoon. Which means we have to get into the kayak when the kayak is already in the water, making our entry a little bit clumsy and "unglamorous". Elegance is not required unless you want to risk capsizing into the rocky shore.

The DMA is relatively small compared to other water venture outlets, so we decided to kayak one round (anti-clockwise cos Willy didn't want to face the morning sun) around the DMA while chatting to get to know each other better.

Today was the first time I met WM and her friend Wee. Both work in IT and WM was actually introducing her friend to the sport, hence the open deck kayak.

The sun was all out that day. Even though we kayaked only a short distance, I'm still fasting and i felt the effects of dehydration within an hour. 

To beat the heat I decided to practice my capsize drill. Soon after, I had some of the others join in (forcibly) by capsizing their boats. And so the fun begins. 

We started plashing each other with water and suddenly a group of adults have turned into a bunch of kids.

When 3 of us were in the water (capsized by each other) one of the water venture staff came by on a powerboat. I guess he was wondering why so many of us had capsized. He gave us tips and guidance  on rescuing each other before giving a subtle reminder that we shouldn't really capsize in the reservoir. (It's untreated water)

Before we knew it, 2 hours had almost passed and we headed back to land.

Willy helped take this photo of us. He tried to zipai as well but failed. Haha..

Exercise Bocca

Yesterday was my first exercise for our NDP stand-by. It was held overnight and despite me having a simple role of triaging the casualties, I was a complete zombie by the end of the exercise. (Ok, that was an exaggeration, but staying awake for long hours has always been difficult for me unless coffee is involved)

So first, we double-checked the generators and ensured they're running on full tanks. Apparently, there were past incidents when the generators would fail at scene. Some displeasure erupted from the overseeing officers and was at the expense of our ma'am's competence to oversee our part of the operation. Hence, our vigorous checking of generators before we leave @_@

After checking that everything's ok, we moved off in our SWIFT to standby at Bishan Fire station for activation.

We decided to fool around inside on the way there. Here's Walter,

We parked near Kallang leisure park and waited for our respective activation. Apparently it was hinted that they may be  100 casualties due to a dirty bomb. 😨

At 1 am in the morning the codeword was released, signaling that a CA was identified. The exercise begins.

I was placed to assist in triaging the incoming casualties. Tagged either P1, P2 or P3, they would be then be relocated for their respective treatments. 

P1s would be sent to our SWIFT for critical intervention treatments.

To our surprise (and perhaps relief) only about 16 casualties were released. Perhaps the higher ups realized that 100 casualties was crazy. 

After debrief and clean up, we took some photos together.

We reached back at 4.00am in the morning and were given the morning off to catch some rest. 😪

Cleaning up for Raya...

It's almost that time of the year again and extra effort has to be put into cleaning the house. 

Just cleaned the fan and window grills in my room today and soon I'll have to put away my books and clear away old belongings. The amount of dust that collects in the room is horrible. Perhaps the recent haze added some additional layers of its own.

Though for the record, it isn't really my room. I just sleep there. I get a small compartment to store my clothes and a shelf for me to place my books. It isn't ideal but I guess this is the closest I got to getting my own personal space at home. :/

Today is only the beginning. Shit gets real when I get back next weekend :O 

Al-Azhar Dinner and New instructors

To celebrate the end of MOC and as well as to welcome the new instructors, we held an Iftar/dinner event at Al-Azhar.

And all was normal until Naf whipped out the hot chilli sauce Isaac brought back from Australia. Mind you, it isn't normal chilli sauce. It freaking burns ur entire mouth.

Hence, the fun started.. with epic reactions. Samuel placed some of the killer sauce in a straw from his watermelon juice before passing it to Zarny who unknowingly took a big sip.

I swear I never saw a face turn beet red so fast. It was almost as if it was about to explode at any moment.

It got so chaotic, we were reminded to keep our volume down. Well, that's what you get when a bunch of guys come down for dinner ;)

Kayaking practice again..

Fasting month has started and I'll have to modify my kayaking activities for now. Which means less expeditions :( 

Though I could still tolerate short practice sessions and I'm thankful for the cloudy weather yesterday that made the 2 hour session more bearable. I was kayaking with 3 other people at sembawang water venture (located at quite an ulu place), one of them i'm meeting for the first time.

With his strong indian accent, the new guy introduced himself as Narayana (a name I keep having trouble to remember). He works as an applications architect, a term I believed is used for software programmers who usually lead a team of programmers in a project rather than directly doing the programming itself. (I.e. senior programmer)

One cool thing I found out about him was that he'd worked in Japan for 3 years, and is able to speak Japanese. He spoke in jest that he was often given higher pay as he was "tri-lingual", being able to speak English, Japanese as well as his first language which I believe should be either be Tamil, or Hindi....

The sea was pretty choppy, making kayaking in our bandits a bit tricky as the bandits would always start to spin. Other than that we had fun chatting and hopefully I'll be able to improve my skills a bit more so I can take my 3 star before the end of this year ~.~

127 MOC POC

And so 5 weeks have finally passed..

My only regret was not being able to spend more time with these good people due to the amount of work I had to take care of especially near the end of the course.

I hoped they've made good memories together and will spend the rest of their time in NS meaningfully.