Origami January 25, 2011 January 25, 2011 Fantastic Frags is our newest sponsor here at WAMAS. It's a small operation out of Southern California and is being run by Paul Auger, a former WAMAS officer from the very, very early days of the club (when it was just getting off the ground). I wanted to give Paul a WAMAS vote of confidence since he was going out of his way to support our club. It was a good experience. Here's the story: In early January, I ordered a couple of frags from Paul. He normally ships on Wednesday, Fed Ex Standard, for delivery by 3 PM on Thursday, so if there are problems in transit, the frags don't sit all weekend in some processing center. I had time commitments on the first Thursday after my order, so Paul readily agreed to delay my shipment as needed. I said that delaying it a week should be fine. He sent me an email asking for a thumbs up for shipping, and I gave him a "go" to do so. This package was picked up in California by FedEx at just before 5PM (Eastern) on Wednesday. I arranged for the package to be held at the FedEx/Kinkos near my work since FedEx standard service (door-to-door) guarantees delivery to your home by 3PM and I wanted the package indoors as much as possible and to get it earlier if available. By having it held, it was to be available to me by 9AM. It arrived there by 7:15 AM. I picked it up at 8:45 AM and drove home. Having it delivered and held at Kinkos turned out to be a good decision. It effectively turned the "standard" delivery service into a Priority delivery. The packaging was consistent with industry standards. An appropriate Styrofoam cooler box was used. Inside packaging peanuts protected the two bags that held one frag each. Each frag was in about 6 to 8 ounces of water and was triple-bagged. A large 30-hour heat pack helped to minimize temperature loss. Upon arrival, I checked the water temperature (73 degrees) and salinity (35.5 ppt) in each bag. Considering how cold it is and considering that Paul keeps his frag tanks at 74 degrees, this was excellent shipping performance. I floated the bags for 15 minutes for temperature acclimation in my system. Then inspected each frag with a 16.5x loupe magnifier for signs of pests. There were none that I could see. Health of each looked good. Each had clearly begun healing from being fragged and new encrusting growth was observed. There was a minor amount of hair algae growing on one frag disk, but this was easily addressed with a scrape of a razor. The coloration of each was somewhat dulled (darker) upon arrival but strong coloration was still observed and offered promise. Neither was bleached and the tissue looked very healthy . It should be noted that Fantastic Frags does not yet post WYSIWYG photos. Hopefully, we
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