We go, rain or shine. This is one of the many reminders that we send to our Reefwalk participants prior to a walk. And so it was, on a cold, dark and wet Sunday morning, that 125 eager participants set off in the rain to explore the intertidal on Kusu. This was the largest group of participants we’ve brought out so far, thanks to the good response from more volunteers stepping forward to guide. Bluebird was on the lookout for the slightest hint of lightning, ready to blow the whistle and call off the walk if the weather got too bad. As this was my first time co-ordinating a Reefwalk, I felt that good ol’ ‘Murphy’ was really being a pain in the ***. Luckily, the bad weather didn’t persist and silver linings soon appeared around fluffy white clouds.

As Floggie mentioned, the downpour not only caused many of the creatures to go into hiding, it kinda mucked up the water quite a bit. But there were still many pleasant surprises in store for us.

Apart from the knobbly sea star and flathead discovered at the sea lagoon, one of our keen-eyed participants also spotted a stonefish! Phew! Thank goodness it wasn’t me leading that group or I probably would have stepped on it, and be posting a very different Klog from a hospital bed right now! Unfortunately I didn’t get to see it in the flesh, but Bluebird has a really cool pic of it that I hope he’ll upload soon. No sand dollars? I think Floggie went to the wrong bank. Not only were some of us ‘paid’ with sand dollars, we even had lots of coin seaweed (Halimeda) for spare change!

Over at the temple lagoon, we had other interesting dudes waiting for us – a scorpion fish, peanut worm and an octopus! Unfortunately, the octopus was dead when I found it but we thought it was alive ‘cos it was still changing colours. I guess it was physically dead but its pigment cells (chromatophores) were still active for a while. The poor sad guy just lay out of the water, his legs sprawled around a rock and head kinda squished between other rocks. Some male octopuses die immediately after mating, so I’m hoping that this was a male, and that this was his cause of death rather than anything else.

Note to Floggie: You missed out on ‘breakfast’ at the temple lagoon. Sausages and grapes aplenty! They were all over the rocky shore. Sausage seaweed (or what I personally call the green ‘tau-geh’ seaweed) and sea grapes. And these sea grapes weren’t the usual Caulerpa lentillifera that we’ve seen and ‘tried’ on Sentosa. These were the larger, juicy ones that look like enoki or buna hon-shimeji mushrooms, Caulerpa racemosa. Yihao and group even spotted a moray eel here! Unagi and green enoki for breakfast?

When the rain stopped and night turned to day, we were greeted by the usual sound of snapping shrimps, busy popping away, and the sight of purple climber crabs scurrying about the rock bunds. Later I found a cute big eyed fish (not Nan), stranded on the rocky shore. He was put in a tank to recover from being left out of water and later identified by Bluebird as a glass perchlet. After a little show & tell for some participants, little big eyed fish was set back into the big blue sea to look for his other little big eyed fish friends :o)

At the start of the walk, everyone, participants, guides and trainees included, were undoubtedly a little apprehensive about the heavy downpour. But by daylight and the end of the walk, I could see that everyone just didn’t want it to end. Looking cold, wet and tired, a few g