Weekend at a kelong

Spent the weekend at a kelong run by three Singaporeans. The website address is kelongfishing.com but when I checked out the website, I found it was called Hot Boys fishing.

Well, it was hot. But I don’t know who the boys are. Unless you were talking about the old uncles fishing off the kelong.

The kelong is just off Pulau Sibu which is accessed via Tanjung Leman jetty.

It’s not a real kelong and it’s run only for tourists.

There are four in the area. Apparently two are badly run, one is has better facilities and food called Ah Fatt Kelong and then there’s the middle of the road one that we visited.

It’s much better to drive up there, park for RM6 a day, take the ferry for RM4 and stay there for 2 days and a night for RM100 or so.

Instead, we paid s$100 to the Kovan Community Club because they’d organised this trip, and my father’s friend was keen to go. Since we’d never been, the rest of us decided to join in as well.

Well, I brought along my Yashica T5, my eBay’d Yashica GSN, my D70, tripod, my eBay’d Garmin Foretrex 101 GPS, and minidisc and in-ear binaurals. The equipment weighed like three times the clothes.

I didn’t really get to do any real recordings because who wants to hear a bunch of tourists talking amongst themselves, especially a bunch of tourists from Singapore.

It was weird being in this kelong. The dinner tables are right next to the bed, next to the TV area, next to the mahjong area, next to the karaoke area. Just beyond the dinner tables is the kitchen next to the washing sinks next to the toilets. And around the four walls that surrounded this area, the platform for fishing.

There was this strange feeling as I watched as others slept while a bunch of us tucked into supper.

It was the first time that I was actually putting my GPS to work. I’d tested it for a few shots in Singapore and it was pretty accurate.

Anyway, the idea is this. Whenever you take a picture, the camera also records the time it was taken. The GPS will also record your position and time as you move around.

You come back, use some programmes like GPSPhotoLinker (Mac) or GPS2Photo (Wind0ws) and it’ll sync the nearest position to when your picture was taken based on the time.

Because GPS2Photo has stopped being free, I used GPSPhotoLinker. I’m still looking for an equivalent on PC so if you know of any, please let me know. Of course there’s plenty of software that does this, but a lot of them just do too much or they cost money. I want something free.

I tried to mark specific wayward points where the photos were actually taken to be more accurate. But I forgot many times. Indeed, some of the routes are missing because I forgot to turn on the GPS.

Okay, the fun thing about GPS linking your photo is that it can then be linked to Google maps and it’ll pinpoint the position where you took the photo. I’ll have to update my gallery software with some plugin so that it’ll work with Google Maps. But that is a project for another day, I think.

I can’t really tell how accurate the GPS was this time, because the location of the kelong is in the middle of the sea. But what is curious is this: although many points are x north of Singapore, the country is marked as Singapore, not Malaysia by GPSPhotoLinker. I don’t know if this is the doing of the software.

It was mostly boring at the kelong, but, I had some fun taking pictures. Just concentrating taking photos.

Here’s the requisite sunrise shot.

Wasn’t much of a sunset. I put on the ND400, modified the white balance for the colours. My tripod was light and damn lousy, so I had to hold my breath and hope for the best. A few were pretty shaky.

Here’s another one with the ND400. Shot in full bright sunlight around 3pm. This is right on Pulau Sibu itself. It is a little blur from handshake, but the best I could find.

Notice the red ridges of rock. They formed really nice patterns all over.

I have placed more shots in my gallery. And of course, there are some that will be scanned in and added from the film cameras – that’s assuming there’s anything good/worth putting in from those rolls.