On one trip, Dad took me down to Patiya, down on the Malaysian Peninsula. We waded in the Gulf of Siam, and feeling clams under our feet, collected them to boil for lunch. Dad has one of his crew take me out on the coral reefs. He had a wooden box, open on one side. With this I floated around the reefs and got closer than I was comfortable to some long-spined sea urchins. That visit was punctuated by a pint of T-N-T that looked like a milk carton with a screw-on fuse. Bump!…followed by bubbles. Then some other fellow showed up in a boat and we gathered up tropical fish in the viewing box. I took them to show Dad, who informed me that the fish were to be the crew’s dinner. At that point, I surrendered the catch. ~Kurt