steelcity's 55

I can't wait for him to fully turn. His blues lines are very bright and he has a nice pink/purple on his face.He'll be a bad fish when he turns.
 
well came home today after spearfishing and found the new condei all tore up with his inners gobbled up. I saw him this morning alive hiding still and looking stressed. That sucks. He was a sharp looking fish.
 
Re: steelcity's 65

coral beauty, sunburst, black clown, yellow watchman, flame tail blenny, and the hoeven's.

No one should any hostility towards him when he was laying out in the open "playing dead". No one even really looked at him. So I don't know he died of starvation, heart attack, or was beaten to death.
 
well it's been awhile. The 55 has turned into a oceanic 75 with a 30 sump. I wasn't crazy about the big glass cross brace but I got the tank for a pretty good price. I didn't have money to buy a new in-sump skimmer and still wanted to use my octo 800s HOB. I took it to my LFS who is FAOIS (John makes the i-tech) and we put our heads together. John is very smart and creative when it comes to this stuff and when he says something you should follow it.

So we took of the intake tube and surface skimmer box and placed the skimmer into the 30. We took a marineland 5500 and placed that in the left side of the sump. I t'd off of the outlet of the pump and have one line for the return and one line feeds the skimmer. I have a 3/4" hose that goes right into the skimmer inlet hole. I have ball valve here and it maybe open 20% to feed the skimmer what it needs. Under the return elbow of the skimmer I took two little carbon baskets and placed them on top of each other to make a hour glass figure and zip tied them. In there is a bag of carbon. On top of that I have some blue foam and then on top of that I have a chunk of the black mesh filter stuff. This got rid of the splashing sound.

The return line to the tank also has a valve and I keep that pretty much wide open. The overflow from the tank enters my home made durso and runs through a filter bag in the sump. So all of the water is "shared" in the sump since there are no baffels. The only microbubbles I get are when the water level gets too low or when I'm changing out the bag real quick. I have maybe .5" of clearance to remove the skimmer cup. It just worked out. The only way the sump will come out will be to smash it or take it out through the top when breaking down.

The switch wasn't that hard. I did it all in one night over a few hours. The most frustrating part was making sure I had the plumbing parts. I was working at a site north of Orlando all week and every night I would come home and stay up late making sure te plumbing was set up. Luckily for me Lowes is 3/4 mile away but after 3 or 4 trips I quickly grew tired of the routine. So long nights and early morning made for a tired steelcity that week. The Saturday before the switch in the store while figuring out the sump, I saw my temminik wrasse. I had to have him. So I paid for him and had John hold onto him. It was now a race against time.

Wednesday night I was ready. Luckily for me I fish and have some very large fish box coolers so temporary staging/storage was no problem. The fish and corals did great. I put a powerhead in each during the time and had no problems. I used all of my rock from the 55 plus I picked up two 10pound pieces from Richard at Tampa Bay Saltwater. I told him what I wanted and he delivered again. He's 2 for 2 on my orders. I like that I just describe to him what I want and size and he leaves it right outside of his house for me to pick up. It's always killer stuff. The whole switch maybe took 3-4 hours. The next day I went and picked up my awesome temminik wrasse.

So my current fish list is this: Hoeven's wrasse, Temminik wrasse, Bi-color blenny (flame tail), sunburst anthia, purple firefish, yellow watchman, coral beauty, pair of black clowns.

I had to get rid of my whitetail bristletooth when I added the temminik. For some reason he did not like the wrasse and would body check him and keep him confined to a hole. I liked him alot but the new wrasse was beautiful. The wrasse could beat on the whitetail if he wanted to but the "fairy" in him made him a wuss.

Lately I have accquired some nice corals I think. I bought some dendros, devils armor zoos, and pink heart zoos from a guy on ebay. He combined shipping it his shipping cost was pretty low compared to others. I kept a watch on this dendros all week and there were no bids. The auction was for 3 heads that started at $9.99. So like everytime I use ebay I bid last minute and put my highest price at $50. I ended up getting those dendros for the list price. I also go the zoos for $10 each. So with shipping I paid $55 for all three. AND best of all, he tossed in 2 extra heads of dendros. So I got 5.

Locally I picked up a neon green moon brain from a guy for $30. I think it's awesome. The other night a guy posted up on RC locally that he broke off some of his orange cap trying to seperate fish in his tank. It was free. So I ran over there the other night and picked up a very bright orange 2' x 3" piece of orange cap. Then yesterday I picked up the diamond goby (who jumped as posted earlier) and a like 8 headed blue hammer to go beside my torch.

So now it's time for pictures. All are taken with my DROID which has a 5 megapixel. It takes decent pics but stil doesn't get the colors closeup like those canons.
 
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Duncans (look at the babies) with sunburst looking
anthia-1.jpg


Everyone hammin it up
closeup.jpg


Clowns in the torch
clowns.jpg


From the left end looking down
downtank2.jpg


From the right end looking down
downtank.jpg
 
Next on the equioment list will be lights. I have the 4 x 54 watt Nova's with the olds single reflector. It works for the time being, I just have to keep it towards to front of the tank. My brain is the first one to tell me when I push the light to far back. It's colors will start fading out. The light works but I'm tired of hearing the fans. In awhile I'll be looking to purchase the 8 bulb tek fixture. This way it will work on my next tank which will be a custom 5' bowfront. This won't be for awhile but it's in my head. I just ordered my new Savage 30-06 and the trijicon scope I want for it is pretty pricey so it's going to be awhile before I get new lights.
 
well headed to Orlando today for my office Christmas party. We dealyed it because the dates we came up with in Dec kind of conflicted with the other guys wives parties and stuff like that. Orlando is somewhat in the middle for all 3 offices (Jax, West Palm, and Tampa). Will hit up Bass Pro and use my gift card from Christmas on some ammo then stop by a cool store up there called World Wide Corals. See what they got and look into another goby perhaps. I'm sure the gf is gonna try to make me swing by IKEA or one of the outlets.
 
Well the new goby is home. He's around 3". While I was dripping him I threw some pellets into the bucket and he ate them right away. Re-cut some pieces of eggcrate to make sure everything is covered. Lights are out for a bit to give him time to find a hole. We'll see how it goes.
 
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