Tearing down the “old and busted”.  I think we had 5 tanks setup in my house at the time of my last post…my 125 gallon display and small frag tank, the wife’s 24 gallon Cardiff and a nano cube for each of the kids.  Well, since then everything but the 125 has gone away.  While the kids loved having their own tanks, they didn’t like having to lug water up and down the stairs to do water changes (or listening to Dad harp because they hadn’t done one recently).   Mom really loved the Cardiff tank (very modern and cool which was important to her), but it ate up too much space in our office and she got tired of only having half a desk to work at.  Finally, my little frag tank was taken down to make way for bigger and better things.

So, on with the “new hotness”.  If you’ve read my Bio or some of my other post, you may already know I’ve been keeping “aquariums” of one sort or another for over 20 years.  With all that experience I’ve toyed with opening my own saltwater fish store a few times, but I just don’t ever seem to get a business model that doesn’t involve me being at the store from open to close an awful lot of the time.  Putting in those kinds of hours on a set schedule seems like going backwards from where I am (I’m spoiled from setting my own hours for too many years).  I’ve been propagating and selling corals on a small scale for some time, but the idea of propagating and selling coral and other marine livestock as a full-time business popped to mind one day.  Ever since we decided to move forward with that idea, I’ve been hard at work with one aspect or another.  I’ve been building tanks/grow-out systems, doing electrical work, building web pages and website shopping carts, you name it…it takes a  lot more than you think to move up to a larger scale coral farming/retail livestock store.

So, while I’ve been keeping things a bit quiet, we have slowly but surely been moving forward.  We now have a new dedicated quarantine system, two separate systems for SPS and LPS/soft corals and four specialized “mini” systems for the propagation of
bubble tip anemones.  At present we are finalizing a few details and finishing up the new website.  If all goes well we should be “live” in a few more weeks.

As always I like to leave you with a photo relevant to my post.  Above is one of my favorite pieces currently in our LPS grow-out system.

Happy Reefing!