I think the year was 2003, right around Nov/Dec, I finally had enough jibber jabber from that dude who ran the fish section of the store in San Bruno on San Mateo Avenue (forget the name, but if you've been around in the area for a while you probably know who I'm talking about), I was done with the "Saltwater is super difficult" speeches, all the cool fricking fish are salt water fish!!!!
So I got a 10g box of instant ocean salt at PetCo (yup you heard me right!) and had a 10g glass tank, and went to work!
So tank had a bag of "bio active 'live' sand", a plastic piece of driftwood with a "coral" on it, a couple of those rocks that look like they came from Arches national park in Utah, an air driven protein skimmer, and one of those reddish/pink mercury aquarium lamps to go over it. Two fish a tomato clown (my nemo) and a blue damsel (who regardless of what people say was never a mean fish) that was the coolest tank ever! The damsel actually lived in the hollow part of the fake plastic driftwood and zipped in and out of there. Went water got low (evaporation) I topped off with more salt water, that was super awesome
Then I found reef central, and at the time BARE's forum on the website. And listening to what most people said (and probably acting a bit arrogant thinking I knew everything when I obviously didn't) I knew I was doing it all wrong. So I upgraded, I went to places like PetSmart to see what tanks they had, and at the time I think I just finished college, or pretty damn close, so I was quite poor at the time. So spending $500+ on the "nice" tank I wanted wasn't going to happen, so instead I went to Craigslist! and I bought...
Tada! a 135g glass tank for $200, the 10 gallon tank I mentioned earlier is in the corner. The fluval canister filter came with the tank, and yeah I used it because it was "free"... the amount of times I dumped a ton of salt water on those floors when I tried to clean/open, etc is uncountable. Needless to say those floors don't look anything like that today, definitely need to refinish them. So how did I set up?
Mistakes
Few bags of play sand at home depot for my sand bed, this was on the tail end of the "you could get southdown aragonite sand at home depot!!!" period.
I think about 180 pounds of dry rock, that came from Hawaii (to make room for a pier??) that I rinsed off by putting in my bathtub and filling it up (I wish I was joking)
90 pounds of Tongan Kaileni live rock from Dr Mac & Sons (now Pacific East Aquaculture), that came into SFO at 4am, during a heat wave that makes what we just had seem cool, it was so bad you could smell the garbage dump from the freeway (101) when passing Candlestick park. Then I promptly inspected the rock, and tossed it into the tank. Oh boy the cycle that occurred!!! I don't think I went into my living room for 2 weeks except when I needed to get to the kitchen (then I held my breath)
Water flow initially was an Aquaclear 802 powerhead, and some pond pump that was rated for a few hundred GPH (yup all this for a 135g tank)
Lighting was 4 - 55w 10000K PC bulbs, which wasn't SUPER horrible, but definitely no SPS.
Skimmer was a Jebo skimmer (not Jebao), and that bad boy supposedly was rated for 180 gallons, HOB skimmer of course
Eventually after the cycle, I made a HOB skimmer box with a few siphon tubes to go to a sump, which was... a plastic Rubbermaid tub, I went through a few of them actually...
Everything associated with changing/removing water was a train wreck on those floors.
Me going to Lucky Ocean and meeting a nice guy running it named Steve, who gave me so many junky corals for free... little did I know this is how drug dealers work to make sure they get clients later!
The very first BAR frag swap, I came home with a big cluster of brown palythoas that I was so happy to get so many of after seeing the size of the frags other people got... oh boy! At least they are officially gone to this day, some of which are still on display at the Steinhart Aquarium! (They managed to keep my soft coral donations alive
)
Eventually though things did get better, I upped my flow to a couple Seio water pumps, lighting I think stayed the same, but eventually once all the micro-stuff started to gel and get into a groove everything else about the tank came together. I still didn't learn my lesson with cheapskating the sumps though for a while
. All in all it ended up making me happy at the time
Favorite fish in there was a foxface that you can see the yellow right in the middle, he was smaller than a chromis at the time, he got bigger... much bigger. You can still see the janky overflow I made.
I think from here my next biggest mistake was buying a 100g acrylic tank from a local reefer, not that there was anything wrong with the tank, but the mentality I had that acrylic was better than glass, it was a smaller tank, it wasn't reef ready (I made it reef ready though), and overall I learned to despise acrylic for it's ability to be scratched so easily. The "it's clearer" argument really holds no bearing unless your panes are absolutely clean as can be, which didn't take much for them to not be... and with glass, some swipes with a razor blade makes its clearer than acrylic
That and being an ultra-cheapskate was the biggest mistakes I've made.
Props to SFSU for still having my webpage up considering I haven't been there in over a decade.
