Tank birthday, 47+ years

Scotland. Thats cool. I have never been to Scotland. The closest I have been was Germany last year and that is pretty far away.
Thank you for posting and for reading all of that dribble. Sorry I rant and go all over the place so much but there was probably something about fish in there someplace. :smokin:

What's the SW hobby like in Scotland? You're about as far from corals as I am in Missouri.
Paul B, I want your worm secret. Have hungry fish that want wigglers. Diet is a key factor in fish health as you have proven. I make my own foods, so adding live foods sounds right up my alley. It is a real honor to be TOTM on any forum. I got it on Aquarium Advice last year. It was really nice to be acknowledged as to having done something right! Don't change a thing.

What kind of feeder are you using on the mandarins and butterfly's?

Its quite difficult here, particularly where I live because of the remoteness of my home im 3 hrs drive from the closest city and even then there are only a few lfs in that area. However the UK as a whole is pretty decent but because the English stole the scottish oil in the north sea ant spent it on builting themselves a decent transit system while essentially leaving us north of the border with sheep trails its quite difficult to get anywhere in the hobby. I have to rely on mail order.

Phew rant over.

I have heard that before from another Scottish friend. You've really got to want a SW tank in your case. I'll bet it's beautiful there.

http://www.saltwatersmarts.com/paul-baldassano-40-year-old-saltwater-aquarium-3078/

This yours? I didn't get to see the video before. Love it. ♥

This yours? I didn't get to see the video before. Love it. ♥

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Eienna, yes that would be mine. I am also a writer on that site and submitted a few articles there.

What kind of feeder are you using on the mandarins and butterfly's?

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Actually I just found a link on this forum that takes you there.

DIY Target Feeder for Mandarinfish (and Pipefish)

Some day I may get to Scotland. I guess I won't dive there but I have never been to that part of the world except for Sicily and Germany, both pretty far away, especially Sicily. I stopped in England once but that didn't really count.

Nobody really wants to go to england anyway. Lol

Except for fish of course

There are still a few places I have not been and want to go. England is not on my list as the diving there sucks and I saw the Beatles. I am not sure exactly what place I would like to go next as I already hit all the places on my list.My childhood dream was to SCUBA dive on the Great Barrier Reef and that was my first dive. I also dove all the Hawaiian and Tahitian Islands, most of the Caribbean and the Bahamas. Most of my dives were in New York for lobsters, ship wrecks and cannonballs which we never found. There are two revolutionary forts here with cannon placements in them to protect Manhattan from the British and we dove there using underwater metal detectors but all we found were huge clams. The clams were as large as cannonballs as they were to deep to collect them so they kept growing. We loaded them into buckets and out wives pulled them up to the boat.This place is under a bridge that separates the Long Island Sound from the East River that flows next to Manhattan and we found out that the water runs through there extremely fast. We jumped of the boat with our equipment on and went to the bottom at 40'The current took us and dragged us tumbling head over fins for about 100 yards until we could make it back to the surface. That is how we discovered that you can only dive there for about 15 minutes every 6 hours when the tide changes. It didn't help that the visibility there is about 2 feet. But that is Man diving, not that Sissy, Mary Jane tropical diving that Sissies do all the time. :becky:

Paul,

How often do you feed the baby brine and how often the worms? You use the same feeder for both?
Love the old fashioned BC. I have a Dacor double hose regulator that would look deluxe with that getup.
I've been to the places you mentioned except Australia. I have a large emergency response system I will be installing there late this year, maybe I need to go along with my crew and check the reef out.

My most amazing sight was watching the Manta Rays loop through our dive lights feeding at night on plankton we attracted. There were a dozen of them lined up, some 10' across. I will never forget that sight as long as I live.

I taught diving in rock quarries here in the Midwest, 1-5' visibility. 90deg on the surface, 55deg on the bottom. Is that sissy diving?

I don't know. Never dove in a quarry. The visibility is about the same here except it rarely reaches five feet but once in a while It did. The only time I got scared diving was here in NY. I forgot what we were diving for but we were off this old Lighthouse that was commissioned by George Washington. It is on a tiny Island in the Long Island Sound. Last year it was on Ghost Hunters or something like that. That is where that picture was taken of me against those rocks in my post above.
It was pitch black and something big grabbed me around my head and was smacking me around. I later found out it was a cormorant bird. Yeah, a bird. These things are about 4 or 5' wide and dive for fish. They are very common and there is the largest cormorant rookery a mile away. The thing crashed into my head and was flapping it's wings around my head.
You can see some of them on top of the lighthouse.
That scared me. We get seals in the winter, some sharks and a rare whale but not much other large creatures that would scare you. We also dive at night because the water is clearer and you can see a little farther with the light as the sunlight reflects off the particles in the water and it appears milky so you don't see anything. But at night, the light comes only in one direction, your light so it is easier to find lobsters.



This is from the top of that abandoned lighthouse. I was asked to go there as a consultant to see if they could turn it into a B&B

That's a horrible way to go, killed by water fowl. I can see why it scared you.

Scared the hell out of me. I don't expect birds when I am diving. I also got attacked by another bird. But not diving. I was the Foreman electrician at a NYC residential garbage incinerator and I had one of those A to Z trailers in the parking lot which was next to a canal. A really filthy canal that was used to transport the garbage ashes on barges. It was summertime and I was looking at the prints in the trailer with the door open. All of a sudden something crashed into the back of my neck and it was flapping it's wings against my ears as it was trying to stand on my shirt collar. I don't know, maybe birds are attracted to bald heads. Anyway, I grabbed it and threw it on the table. It was filthy, wet and covered in soot. The thing couldn't stand up and was just flapping on my table making a mess out of my blue prints. I took it outside and threw it up in the air figuring it would fly away. Did you ever see that movie "Rodan?" It flew half way across the canal and fell in. In a few seconds he sunk.
I found out what was wrong with him because after that I noticed it a few more times. The birds would fly over the huge chimney which was over 100' high, and they would be over come by heat, soot and I guess the smell of garbage and they would croak.
They would dive bomb right into the parking lot or the canal. I rescued a couple and a sparrow by washing them off.
The place was very toxic and anything metal, even stainless steel would just rot away. Everything had to be hot dipped galvanized PVC coated and cost a fortune. I was amazed at the cost of even a small fitting. A normal condulet which is a type of electrical box and may sell for $15.00 there cost $250.00.
I sent a guy to see if he could re wire this huge motor that pulled cables to open a flue which was a cinder block wall about 40' wide and weighed a few thousand pounds. It was buried in a big mound of soot. My guy shoveled out the soot and the motor was gone. Just disintegrated under the ash.
Of course we were breathing that stuff in but that just mixed with the asbestos and Agent Orange so maybe they cancelled each other out.
The lower picture is me cad welding in that incinerator. The top picture is me on the roof of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. That is snow covered Central Park below me.

That's a horrible way to go, killed by water fowl. I can see why it scared you.​

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How would they put that in my insurance report? Scared to death by underwater bird.

Does that light on the Plaza Hotel look familiar?

Basic old MH. I got hit in the head by a bird while driving a station wagon. I'm not bald, so who figures?
We install big satellite antennas on high buildings all over. So rooftops are very familiar to us.

Is that the MH over your tank?

I threw out those MH lights. They were from what I had left over from lighting up the Plaza Hotel. Now I have LEDs

I bet those old MH sucked the electricity!!!!!

Yes they did, so I installed solar panels on my roof which saves me $1,500.00 a year in electricity.
They raised my heating oil to $5.00 a gallon so I installed a gas condensing boiled which brought my heating bills from $5,000.00 a year to $960.00 a year which includes hot water and cooking gas. Now gasoline is high so I am looking into a fully electric car. I don't just sit around and let them raise prices on me without doing something about it.