17 January 2009

Volvo Race outreach with the Scouts

A very windy day at 1degree15 Marina at Sentosa for the Volvo Race special Scouts' marine outreach programme brings a motley group of marine groups together.
The lovely Debby Ng of the Hantu Bloggers had a great booth with photos of the amazing marine life at our very own Pulau Hantu.
Her fabulous photos truly opens our eyes to our reefs!
November Tan shares the ever popular baby dugong at the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research booth.One of the Scouts even shared that he had seen a pair of dugongs once while kayaking at Pulau Sekudu! Here he is with November. November will soon blog all the details of his encounter on her Pulau Ubin Stories blog.
Anand meanwhile, shares about the sea turtles and how baby sea turtles were once seen hatching at East Coast Park. Some of them didn't make it and these are now in the Museum. One of these was at the exhibit.
Jun of the Coral Nursery Project had a tank of her live baby corals! Some corals have long nasty stinging sweeper tentacles to zap other corals. These naughty corals are raised above the others.At the booth, the kids even got to try out scuba gear!Jerald and Ley Kun of the Naked Hermit Crabs had a great way to get ordinary people to learn about our shores.Liana had designed a special game for this event!It's really quite exciting and everyone wanted to play.The game involves cool cards and photos which worked even in the gusty winds!The Naked Hermit Crab colouring booth was also a great hit, as usual, with adults too!
With some stunning results!
TeamSeagrass also had a booth: with a tank of live seagrasses and monitoring gear and lots of posters.The live seagrasses came in handy for showing features like the fact that they are flowering plants, as Siti Nurbaya explains here.
Siti is great with the kids, who enthusiastically clamour to answer her questions.Some give really wacky answers to the delight of their friends.And this group from Bartley are very keen to join the TeamSeagrass trips!
There were all kinds of other fun activities at the event. With giant balls to tumble inside of, free video screenings, and a Q&A session with the Volvo Race team which was apparently quite interesting (e.g., Q:"How often do you change your clothes?" A: "When someone else in the team tells you to").There was a simulator that was quite popular, with queues forming constantly.Some of us even went for the ride. Marcus Ng says it's like a bumboat ride.One of the weird decorations in the Marina reminded us of the swimming sea anemone (Boloceroides mcmurrichi)!
This fantastic opportunity for us to share about our shores is all thanks to Tan Sijie, who looks so snazzy in his Scouts uniform, don't you think? Sijie is an active volunteer in many of these marine groups and was also hard at work sharing about our marine life. He worked very hard to put the show together and I think it was a great success!
He even arranged for all of us to have lunch and free ice-cream! Here's the TeamSeagrass folks taking a short, well-deserved break in a long day of selling seagrasses.After some photo taking of one another, we ended quite exhausted but satisfied in having reached out to so many people about our shores and key marine issues.

Other blog posts about the event

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails