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47 year old tank


sen5241b

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So this morning I went for my walk, Bike ride.  Down the 167 steps to the beach and I noticed that it was dead low tide. 

 

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 I have never been on this beach, behind my house before at dead low tide and I noticed that there were seaweed covered rocks exposed.  Seaweed covered rocks are to me like High Heels to a Supermodel so I walked (not very fast) the 100 yards or so to the place and started lifting rocks. 

 

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I was in my glory that there were amphipods all over the place like weirdoes at a Lady GaGa concert.

( I know because our Daughter got us tickets to one of those.  Girls "walking" their boyfriends on dog collars didn't do it for me)

 

The beach is very clean, not even a nose hair to be found so I didn't have anything to put amphipods in but I needed to get some as the tide changes an hour each day and the tide wouldn't be this low at this time in the morning for a very long time and I was very disappointed that I couldn't get any.  

 

I started to walk back to the stairs when just then, out of nowhere, I see a plastic bottle.

 

I rush over and pick it up.  I was thirsty and it was half filled with a dark liquid.  I removed the cap and brought it up to my lips and........No, I didn't drink it.  I was born at night but not last night.  I smelled it and it was Coke.

 

I poured it out and rinsed it out.  Now I started to collect amphipods, but the mouth of the bottle was small so I had to collect them one at a time.  I don't know if you have even gone amphipod collecting but as soon as you lift a rock, the amphipods run like they are just missing the five PM train out of Manhattan on Fourth of July Weekend.

So you can only get one as the rest run away and jump off the rock.  Collecting this way doesn't yield too many pods.

I normally swish the rocks in a bucket of water which i didn't have so I only got maybe 25 amphipods.

 

 

 

I didn't want my fish to eat them because these were very big so they were breeders.   I put some under my UG filter and the rest I added behind the rocks in the dark.

 

I may go tomorrow an hour later as it will be low tide again but hotter so going up all those stairs will be tough.

 

 

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No, it's an amphipod. :cheers:

They really don't want you to repair these Chinese LED fixtures.  My blue lights went out so I took the thing apart to fix it.  I figured it was the driver, but it was the LEDs themselves.  5 of them were sort of melted.  I had a couple of blue LEDs and I shorted out one to get the thing running.  You can see the one I shorted out.  Now it's "almost" as good as new with just a few Blues that don't light.

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Paul, it's easy enough to find a bad LED in these setups with a battery. But I've also found that sometimes, when the string goes out, that if you turn it on, there's enough leakage to dimly light the good LEDs leaving the bad ones dark. I turn the lights off in my shop and let my eyes acclimate before checking this way first. Sometimes it saves a little time. (I also keep a few spare LEDs on hand for replacement.)

 

As you probably also noticed, the plastic discolors over time on these LEDs leaving them looking like they've been dipped in coffee.

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Tom, thats what I did.  The bad ones still glow slightly and I do have a battery to test them.  But I use my old Simpson Multimeter on the resistance scale.  It puts enough "juice" across the LED to make it glow.

 

I have some spare LEDs but they are not the correct voltage to light but they provided the right resistance and I shorted out one to get the thing running.

It could run forever the way it is as I have enough light.

 

I am at a loss for words which is a first for me so I will just update my tank.  OK, thee is nothing to update, it is the same as it always is. 

I can try to name the fish but I am sure I will miss some.

 

2 Gecko Gobies

Copperband

Mandarin

Scooter "Bleeny"

Queen Anthius

Possum Wrasse

Janss Pipefish

Red Perchlet.

Yellow Wrasse.

2 Striped Cardinals

Hippo Tang (with no spots)

2 Fire Clowns

2 Watchman gobies

Some kind of red fish

Rainsford Gobi

Some kind of brown fish.  Maybe a bleeny.

 

That makes 20, I am not sure if I missed any.

 

I also have this very cool decorator crab.  I don't remember how long he has been in there because I rarely see him, even if I am looking right at him, but he is very cool.

 

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That's a cool crab, Paul. The sponge makes it look a bit like an old stuffed animal.

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Tom, I have a video of him moving but it just looks like he is doing push ups.  Just look at the above picture and move your monitor up and down about an inch.  That is exactly how he looks when he moves. 

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We are having company this weekend so we went to Costco to get hamburgers. 
We are taking them on the boat then back to the pool to Bar be cue.

So my wife says we can just "jump" into Costco for the hamburgers.

We get to Costco and I run to the cell phone booth because I need a new battery on my 8 year old "I" Phone 4. I know the guy and I don't want a new "upgraded" phone because I know it won't work, I won't be able to figure out how to use it, I have to kill half an hour for him to program it, and I don't want to pay another $49.00 a month being my old phone works fine and is paid for. Besides I don't need my phone to make me breakfast, put gas in my car, feed my fish and get my slippers. Just make phone calls and don't annoy me. 

The guy I need is on vacation so I look for my wife. She is buying sweatshirts for the Grand Kids, Water Piks, beach chairs, pop corn, olives, flashlight batteries, flounders, Halloween costumes, 
celophane, vacuum cleaner bags etc. Everything but hamburgers.

I tell her, "I thought we were going to "jump" in here for hamburgers. Then of course she gets mad and says now I am shopping for things we "need". Why don't you go to Home Depot?

How do women do that? I hate to shop and if I need hamburgers I park the closest I can get to the door, run in and ask the closest person where the hamburgers are.
(I don't need a shopping cart as they take too long) 

She points to the back corner of the store and If I could get there diagonally by climbing over the counters, I would. I quickly look down the aisles and avoid the ones where there are people. Then I get down the least crowded aisle to the hamburgers, find the closest package and grab it. I put it under my arm and in one quick motion, spin around and go as fast as I could to the least crowded check out counter.

If there are more than 2 people on line, I run back to the hamburger section, throw them back into the case and go back to my car as I have PTSD and I don't do lines. On my way home 
I change the menu and go to a deli and we have sandwiches. 

This all takes place in under 8 minutes. 
Thats the way a Man shops.
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That Hippo Tang I threw in my tank two or three months ago looks great. No spots, no lumbago, no irritable bowel, no cataracts, no worms, no flukes, no flounders no nothing. That health comes from not quarantining.

I also don't feed him lettuce, spinach or "The impossible burger". He eats worms, clams and LRS food like everyone else and he gets over it. I think he meditates. :rolleyes:

If I quarantined him he would now be on the disease forum and people would be telling me to dip him in stump remover while fresh water dipping him and adding Prizapro to French Onion soup to feed him while giving him soapy water enema's. :oops:

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Thanks, I buy them whenever I see them but they are Caribbean and mostly banned.

 

The rest of them are filling in nicely though after the move.  :cheers:

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So this morning I took my normal bike ride to the cliff to go down to the beach.
It is a little brisk today. I put my bike there and started down the long walk to the stairs.

This is part of the walk way to the stairs.

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Then I got to the stairs and heard all this rustling as it is a steep cliff with all bushes.
I saw three of these guys. One was a little one and hid in the bluffs. And I am not Bluffing. 

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This is on top of a steep cliff over the sea which is angry today because it is so windy.

As I was descending I heard this loud noise, like a snort. It sounded just like an elephant. I am a boy from New York and we rarely find elephants here, especially up on a cliff.
I couldn't get off the walkway as it is built high and if you touched the sand underneath the stairs, I think the entire mountain of sand would collapse causing me to call the ski patrol to dig me out.

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I am sure they are off for the summer so I would be in trouble and besides, they couldn't get to me because it is hard to climb stairs wearing skiis. 

I never did find that elephant but I kept looking and I didn't even see his footprints in the sand.

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So I got the boat back to the Marina this morning and they took it out of the water.

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The first thing I noticed is that they didn't put any bolts in the two "Zinc's" on the power tilt pistons.  This would not cause any problem like the one I am having but the zinc's are supposed to be bolted in or they don't do anything and they are expensive.  To make a complicated story short, they are made of zinc (like Duh) and they are supposed to rot before parts of your boat rot.  But if they are just hanging there, they are not doing anything so the Jiboni's would have had to take my boat out of the water to put the bolts in anyway.

 

The "mechanic" told me "sometimes they rot out"..  I was born at night but not last night and I am not an accountant.  I was an A rated GM Mechanic and I know stainless steel doesn't rot out in 2 months.

 

I said, that can't happen.  Then he said, "sometimes they come loose".  Yeah right, 4 stainless steel bolts coming not just loose, but completely falling off in 2 months.

 

I mean if you screw up and make a mistake at least make up something plausible or tell the truth that you messed up.  I was a mechanic and I could have done that.  Or I would at least make up something believable about Aliens or Bigfoot.

 

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We didn't find anything obviously wrong with the shift cable but I had him change this shift arm anyway.  I figured I came all this way, took the boat out of the water, removed the drives so I may as well waste some money.

 

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I made it home without incident so I am not sure if it is fixed or not. image.gif.45eec907aa7e12027261376ad317a0ad.gif

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I can't buy an interesting fish no matter how much money I throw at them. They got tangs and angelfish and I find them very boring. Nothing unusual. Corals, forgetaboutit. They got tiny frags and at my age, I don't do tiny anything. I probably couldn't see them or my hermit crabs would carry them away.

To add any corals I would have to cut away a lot of blue green sponge that covers most of my tank. But it cuts easy with a razor blade.

We are supposed to take some trips, but again, at my age, I already went to everyplace I want to go. Except the Galapagos. I haven't been there but my wife hates lizzards.

I also didn't go to Easter Island but my birthday is on Christmas so that is a different holiday and I don't know if I can mix holidays like that.

If I decided to go hang gliding or bungee jumping my insurance company would disown me because I already broke or tore everything that is breakable .

I still dive (very occasionally) but from spending so much time underwater, the fish find me boring as they all saw me already.

WE are having people over (again) for the weekend and I know there is a big pool party. Then we will go on my boat to waste some gas and hopefully not get stuck and have to come back on one engine. But that sometimes happens in boating. Boating is fun. Young people today IMO don't know how to have fun.

I tell that to my Daughter all the time. She is 40 and at her age we always had a big crowd and would get everyone together and either go to a river upstate to Kayak down the rapids and camp or go to a lake with our small canoe's or sailboats and sink each other. There would be maybe 20 of us.
We once went to the "Ice Caves" in the snow. They are only open in the summer and they have ice then. We brought ropes and lowered ourselves down into the caves with flashlights. Very cool.

My Daughter and her friends text each other as to what they will do and they do nothing but text each other. They text about how much fun it is to text.

Then they meet each other at someone's house, and sit there so they can text other people to ask them to join in on a group text.
Our Grand Daughter texted us yesterday to tell us she was looking at the window. And she lives in Manhattan so all she can see is the roofs of taxi cabs. I know her generation is going in the same direction as our Daughter. A generation that does nothing.

There's a whole world out there and a lot of it is free. In those days we couldn't rub two nickels together to make a dime but we always did things.
This was at a lake many years ago before they invented time.
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OOOHHHH  NNNOOOOO.  Disaster.  No Really!!.

I looked at my tank and it was all foggy.  OK, maybe smoky.  A combination of foggy and smoky.  My friend was here and he said, "That coral looks like it is dead!!!"

 

I said, "Can't be"  It was fine a few hours ago.  Then I noticed my skimmer wasn't working as there is a crack in the plastic and not enough water is going into the skimmer.

 

AAAAHHHHHHHhhhh.'

 

I found that one coral was just about all croaked and another one is almost all croaked.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!  Oh Noooo.

 

I got the skimmer working and it overflowed about a gallon of water on the floor.  It kept foaming out like when you put 15 times too much soap in a washing machine.  image.gif.db332a3522d39272ceda854170ac8185.gif

 

OOOHHHH  NOOOO.

 

The effluent from the skimmer was much too much to go down the tube to the drain so we found a big PVC elbow and stuck it on the top of the tube so it at least went into a bucket.  It was overflowing all over me.

NNNNNoooooo!!

 

Then I got my diatom filter and after spilling a couple of gallons of water on my feet and the floor I got the thing running.

 

The skimmer was still going nuts so I knew there was something in the water....  But What!!!!!

 

As I was fixing the skimmer I kept getting stung by the long spine urchin.  Then I noticed.

Why is his spines sticking out of the water like 4"

 

Then I remembered.  Years ago I had an urchin business and I would SCUBA for urchins and sell them.  Once they all spawned at the same time.  I think I walked in front of the tank wearing my Speedo which caused that to happen.

 

But when they spawn, they go to the top of the water and stick their spines out, then spawn.  And sea urchins have a LOT of spawn.  I mean a LOT.  And this is a ten year old very large urchin.  

 

He was still spawning and turned the water into "Half and Half".  Normally that is not a problem and the skimmer removes it right away.  But if the skimmer isn't working, the stuff rots and the corals frown on that and croak.

 

Now I have the diatom running and the overflowing is almost managable but still happening.  I have to let this keep overflowing for a few hours to get those poisons out of the water so maybe my other corals won't croak. image.gif.2321f214eaa896caf399edbb41f1a54e.gif

 

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Not the ending I expected...even for a Paul story. Love it. Bummer about the skimmer. Whatever survives will be well fed. Hopefully you have some good oxygenation while it clears as that is what usually kills the fish.

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It is good now, no more skimmer foam and all is well.  That coral stopped croaking and the rest of it looks good.  It's a good thing I was home.  Now I am fixing the crack in the powerhead that runs the skimmer

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