Introducing ME!

[Caryl]

I just realised that, having been a member before this Welcome section was added, I have never introduced myself.

My husband Grant and I have had fish for about 22 years (and my dad had a goldfish pond he built himself when I lived at home too).

We started off by killing guppies in great numbers before discovering that the gravel the LFS (actually a garden centre with a few fish) had sold us was meant to be used to spawn Africans (no wonder the pH kept ring to over 8.0!) :evil: .

Our one 2ft tank (sorry but I still think of tanks in feet and size rather than capacity. Someone saying they have a 25 gallon or 30 litre tank means absolutely nothing to me) grew to two 2ft tanks (one had the unfortunate guppies, then platies the other had blue acaras - beautiful fish).

From then on - you guessed it - the tank numbers grew until we had 18 of the damn things all over the house. The smallest was 1ft square and the largest were two 4ft tanks. Each child (luckily only 2 of them ) had a tank in their room too.

We have kept all sorts over the years, mostly barbs and tetras. Our worst failures (apart from guppies) were mollies. This was before we found out they preferred a little salt.

I have bred (without any effort on my part, the fish did it all by themselves) mollies, guppies, platies, convicts, white clouds,bristlenoses, leopardfish, scheeli killifish and danios. The danios actually spawned in a heavily planted 4ft community and two fry managed to survive being eaten.

We were very lucky to see an advert in our local paper asking if anyone was interested in starting a fish club so we rang... 13 years later we are still involved. Grant has been president over time and I have variously been secretary, editor, treasurer (they were desperate!) and am currently president.

We affiliated to the FNZAS and eventually ended up on the executive. Grant was faulty equipment officer while I became editor of the national magazine the NZ Aquarium World. After 6 years of this (plus also producing monthly newsletters for the Marlbough Aquarium Club, Amateur Radio Club, and Lifeline at the same time) it got a bit much and I resigned.

We have been attending FNZAS conferences for 9 or 10 years and thoroughly enjoy meeting fellow fishkeepers.

A couple of conferences back Cees told me he was thinking about starting a web page and what did I think of the idea? I was enthusiastic and said if he wanted a guinea pig to test it on he could use me as I had no experience of surfing the Net and had never signed up to any site so if I could figure out his site - anyone could!

For those of you thinking "Hang on, they own a computer company!" Let me point out we sell and repair hardware, not software, and Grant is the technician while I am the credit manager. This means he does the work and I manage to take the credit! :lol:

I am sure Cees regrets the day he ever asked me to "try this" as the web site got off the ground. It has gone from strength to strength and I love logging on (see, I have even picked up some of the jargon - though it took me ages to figure out what a LFS was :oops: ) to see who has said what.

Well, although we have reduced our tanks to one 4ft tropical (with rainbows in it at the moment) we are still interested in fish.

Details of this tank - it is 4ft x 20" x 21" (1.2m x 51cm x 54cm), built into a floor to ceiling, 12ft wide rimu wall unit (I designed it around the tank and it covers the whole end wall of the lounge) with a homemade, external, under tank heating pad and running a Fluval 404. The lights are just 2 double fluorescents (bright white) with reflectors, sitting on top of a glass lid which in turn is covered by a rimu lid.

All those of you who joined before this welcome section was added - come and tell us about yourself!

[Goldie]

Yay Caryl. What can I say except thanks thanks thanks for the help and support and sharing this site with me. Big hug.