A lesson in patience, calmness and thinking out of the box

On saturday, I brought my daughter Melody to the Kids Farm at Pasir Ris to catch "lokang" fish. The task is quite simple, pay $4.50 for your child, bring along a small net and pail and head to a small shallow meandering pond (see picture) and start catching as many small fishes swimming in the pond with the small net.

The catch is, the task looks simple but is actually quite difficult if we approach it in the most obvious way - eye the fishes, move towards them, lower the net to scoop them up. Wrong! The fishes are extremely agile, swims quickly, switch direction when you do, hide under the bridge, play hide an seek around big stones introduced in the pond and take refuge amidst turbulent water generated by water features.

This is my second attempt at this pond and I must admit it was hard work and a great work-out with very little yield in terms of catch. The more frantic my children and I were in chasing and randomly scooping after the fishes, the more futile our attempts. The more impatient we became to net the fishes the worst our outcome. Often times, we caught the sickly fishes who were too traumatised by the chase and they die soon after - lousy catch.

During this visit, I was determined to calibrate our approach. I thought to myself that there must be a better way to catch the fishes. I did not rushed in to chase after the fishes as I did before. This time I spent time to watch the behavior of the fishes - where do they congregate, what were the group behavior of the school of fishes when others were trying to net them, etc. I realised that the fishes often swim near the surface of the water when they are trying to escape from a catch, and they congregate in big numbers in a sense of safety under the bubbles of the water features in the pond. Hence, the best way to net them is at the water feature with a swift scoup of the net from bottom up.

With calmness, I would position myself at various water feature and with each swift scoup I would land 2-3 fishes in my net. In the process, I caught many fishes for my kids. Melody on her own too, managed a few. It was a harvest and my kids were extremely pleased.

The moral of the story: more haste, less speed. It is useful to be patient, be calm and think out of the box - the results may be better. From the perspective of the fishes - where you think it would be the safest, it can be the most dangerous!