preacher

All I seem to find on my nightly excursions around the Hutt river is trout, trout and more trout Mind you I got a surprise last night, I found a tiny silver goldfish in a pool under our local bridge. Mind you, theres a pile of driftwood under there too...

Thanks for the hello's. Great to hear from you Stella, I hear your our resident natives expert. I had a big clean out of our approx. 120L pond yesterday, we had great fun catching all the fish and shrimp. Mind you, I should have checked the weather forcast for today. I probably wouldn't have done it if I had known it was going to be wet and cold. Still, such is life. I completely re-did the inside of the pond to try and better simulate a stream environment for the natives. Rocks around the inside edge, with the plants coming out of them and plenty of branches and driftwood submerged. After we refilled it my 13yr old and I did a head count of our fish, and boy were we surprised. My estimate of 10 Inanga, 20 Bulles and 30 Shrimp was a little off.... There were : 14 Inanga, 46 Bullies (Bluegills?), 41 Shrimp, oh and the 9 small goldfish of course. I wouldn't mind a few more Inanga, and you can never have enough shrimp. P.

Hi there, my name is Peter. Although my family have a history of water features with goldfish I am relatively new to this. It all began with my own pond (this is the second one I have built) at our current home. We started with 11 goldfish and 16 tadpoles, then one day I was walking down the local river and saw a pool under a tree that was cut off after the river dropped. Being curious I took a peek and was astounded to see lots of little fish. A week later I showed my 13yr old daughter and sure enough "can we catch some?" So we soon ended up with some little fish which I promptly mis-identified as torrentfish (they are in fact bullies). My fascination was caught and I began doing some research into native fish, discovered they are mostly nocturnal and began my midnight fishing expeditions. Armed with a net in each hand and a torch in my mouth I started under the local bridge where I had seen a pool and caught a 'big' fish (10cm). I brought it home and mis-identified it as an Inanga. A couple of nights later and I got a second, along with more small bullies. After a couple of weeks I noticed I didnt seem to have as many bullies as I thought. Then 1 night I found another pool that was cut off and caught a fish... which turned out to be an Inanga. I discovered my 1st 2 Inanga were infact junior trout! That explained my disappearing bullies. (The trout went back to the river as soon as I could catch them again.) Currently we have 9 goldfish, 10 Inanga, about 20 bullies and perhaps 30 shrimp. My wife thinks I am totally mad scrabbling over rocks at 1am, but hey I'm English so it goes with the territory hehe. I have made contact with the Upper Hutt society and am looking forward to seeing if there is anyone else out there as mad as I. P.