Friday, September 9, 2011
The welfare committee for my ship recently organised another cohesion activity, scrapping the paintball idea for a day at the beach. I must say, I think the time we spent there would have beat a day with paintball anytime.
For the past few weeks, we had been staying back later to finish up our preparation for Engineering Inspection, a ship-wide inspection by the fleet to assess our hardware, in terms of safety and efficiency. The efforts put in were slowly giving rise to a sentiment of a much deserved break, and the cohesion that was to come thus had some big boots to fill.
During the planning stages, I was initially slated to be a station IC for station games, but volunteered to be the photographer for the event for a few reasons. For one, I hadn't tried a photo op at the beach before, so it would be something new.
We were to arrive at Palawan Beach, Sentosa, by 8:45, and it turns out that nobody really goes there that early on a weekday, for the beach was mostly ours for the whole duration. The crowd only started trickling in as we left at 11 that day. Here are the photos that I've whittled down.
The briefing was done at the beach itself. It resembles a small lagoon, with a drawbridge in the middle. The place actually did look quite good, and the sand closer to the shore's edge was the soft, nice kind of sand. This person here is our Comms Officer, posted over recently from my RSS Brave, where Liang De is.
The fishing-rod-banana-dangling-eating game station, where two participants are blindfolded. One has to feed the other a banana tied to a fishing rod line. It was quite hilarious, seeing how some people could gobble the banana with ease, and how some others just engaged in prolonged foreplay. The person tying the blindfold is the Commanding Officer, an LTC. The fisherman is our Navigating Officer.
Here's another station, where one guy has to don a Swimmer-On-The-Watch (SoW) gear, get waist deep in the lagoon and pick out balloons with the right letter on them. The first team quickly thought to make subsequent teams suffer by throwing the balloons further out into the lagoon.
A pipe with many small holes was the subject of the next station, where the teams had to devise a way to keep the water in the tube such that one could pick a ping pong ball from its top. Some wrapped it with a trash bag provided, and some others buried the pipe partially into the sand.
I had to squat really low for this shot, recomposing a few times, but I think it was quite worth it.
Another element of the whole game involved the kidnapping of one teammate from each team. They were chained and locked up, and once all the stations were completed, a team could guess from a series of boxes which one contained their key.
So what would they do once they got their teammate back? They now had to bury him in his own shellscrape. No kidnappee was spared the creative sculpting of sand to shape obscene body parts.
Some teams still hadn't finished, though. This station required teams to coordinate quickly to form a group pose, with each pose requiring more and more people to participate. As usual, some of the poses were ridiculously funny.
The banana eating game once more, with Comms Justin using his iPad 2 to capture each 'feeding time'.
Our Chief Engineer, whose body shape resembled a stereotypical engineer build, enjoyed frolicking in the lagoon that day. Here he poses nicely for a shot.
A beach get-together is not really complete with liberal numbers of dunkings. Four people chipped in to dunk this guy, who ORDed that day wearing really colourful clothing, with bling and flashy sunglasses to match. In the background, our Executive Officer looks on encouragingly.
Water bombs were also provided that day, and though there weren't a lot to go around, there were enough of them for many to get soaked. When I saw someone about to launch a water bomb or pail of water, I'd hold down the shutter to ensure I got a good frame-by-frame capture. Here, the organizer gets one to the butt from the Leading Electrical Control Specialist.
Some didn't give in without a fight...
... And most who were targeted succumbed to their fate in the end.
I was really scared then that someone might come up to me, take my camera away and get others to dunk me, given I was staying close by the shore the whole time photographing the fun. Didn't happen though.
The summary shot with more tags in one picture than I've ever seen. I think a lot of us enjoyed the day, and I'm really happy the pictures were nicely received by the crew on facebook. There are still some more uploaded there, go have a look if you have the time!
Labels: navy, photography, thoughts
posted by joseph at 6:09 PM