Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Chek Jawa!

A hearty cheer to everyone from Chek Jawa!
From the garang volunteers of Kok Sheng's Chek Jawa project, a hearty cheer to more good years for Chek Jawa and our other shores! And today, we are privileged and blessed to also have Joseph Lai with us. It was Joe who first publicly raised the Chek Jawa issue which led to eventual deferment of reclamation.

This tradition of celebrating the new year, began with the first New Year on Chek Jawa after reclamation was deferred in 2001.
Siva, who is in this photo, still remains involved as he is Kok Sheng's supervisor for the Chek Jawa project!

Earlier this year, we also celebrated the New Year on Chek Jawa.Also with Joe, and with the leads of TeamSeagrass (Siti, Shufen and Wei Ling) and the super guide Chay Hoon (right most).

We hope to be able to continue this tradition for many more years on Chek Jawa.

The day began much earlier, as the team of volunteers helping Kok Sheng headed down to monitor and measure a whole bunch of stuff.Here they are, heading down to the shore with the humungous orange flags.

The happy team doing the peacock anemones! Apparently much easier this time as all the transects have been set up previously. There were also very energetic volunteers doing salinity tests, and counting sea stars and more.

I got the carpet anemone job again (actually, it's the only thing I know how to do). Today, we were lucky to have four people in the carpet anemone monitoring team.
My long-suffering team mates, here fixing up the poles, were YC, Sam and Siew Lee.

It is very obvious in this photo that two extra pair of hands really made the job a lot easier!

We also replaced the numbers on the poles today. Which was a little difficult as the poles were all encrusted with barnacles and other tenacious beasts.

However, YC proves to be even more tenacious!The anemones on Chek Jawa were doing really well!

There were little ones everywhere in all kinds of colours.And lots of very large ones too!All looking healthy and happy! Let's hope there will be no serious flooding this year in Johor, so that this recovery can go on and Chek Jawa will return to its full splendour.

And here's a last cheer from the irrepressible YC for a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!