Tembak Series 1—The Search For Something In Common

I have mentioned that the CoC for this hunt did a good job in balancing the easy and tough questions. However, sometimes hunters need to slow down a bit when dealing with "easy" questions. For even the simplest-looking question may have an unexpected twist which renders it "difficult".

QB3) IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A KITE! IT'S AN ISLAND.

A devilish idea of the CoC which almost caught me unaware. It's an obviously easy and straightforward question which required a bit of general knowledge. We reached the sector, saw the obvious "SWALLOWS (K.K.) TRADING SDN. BHD." and mechanically wrote down the answer—all done within a minute.

However, when we were making our final round of the sector, the "grammatical inclination" kicked in. "IT'S A BIRD..." could only mean one thing—it meant we were looking for a singular item. Since "SWALLOWS" is plural, it followed that it couldn't have been the required answer. We were discussing a treasure riddle when Mia suddenly saw a superior answer—LAYANG-LAYANG, which was a perfect fit for the question. And that was quickly followed by the excitement of everyone in the car trying to claim credit for this obviously correct answer. Not exactly a very neat red herring, but we almost fell for it anyway!

Later on, in a different sector, we had a similar question:

QH3) RED, BALTIC AND MEDITERRANEAN.

This time it was a shorter sector. Well, actually, the sector was quite long, but we were able to quickly shorten it substantially because we found the other answers in the sequence. Looking up to the top of the tall building, we saw "SEA" at SABAH ENGINEERS ASSOCIATION. And again it's very tempting to just quickly accept SEA as the answer. However, SEA failed on grammatical grounds. We're talking about the Red (SEA), Baltic (SEA) and Mediterranean (SEA). Those are THREE Seas, and therefore the answer must be in plural form—SEAS.

It was for this reason that I lingered on for a while, trying to search for a less visible SEAS (with the "S" in the end). It's quite obvious to me that this was yet another red herring. Good try by the CoC, but sorry, their red herring was not gonna work on a hunter with grammatical obsession like me!

Although I did not fall for this second decoy, I failed to find the required SEAS or OCEANS even though I spent some time scanning practically each and every single board within that sector. Now what?

Well, that's the funny thing about treasure hunting—sometimes, when you are unable to find the correct answer, you would take an answer which you know is wrong. Yet you still offer that wrong answer anyway if only for the sake of filling up the answer space!

Of course, later on, when the answer was revealed by the CoC, you can imagine my relief when it turned out that SEA @ SABAH ENGINEERS ASSOCIATION was indeed the required answer.

I think it was a minor oversight by the CoC which could have saved some precious minutes for us hunters. But this is where prudence can lose out to the new hunters. I suspect that most of them arrived at the sector, saw the SEA, took it and left the sector in a jiffy; whereas this experienced hunter made a fool of himself, looking for something which did not exist in that sector!

A possible improvement to the question is by replacing the word "AND" with "OR", thus making it:

Q) RED, BALTIC OR MEDITTERANEAN.

In which case we're talking about the Red SEA, Baltic SEA or Meditteranean SEA independently in isolation one at a time. And it would then fit the singular SEA perfectly.