Time to Rock It Out & Light It Up (UPDATE#5):
Aquascape! This word scares me and annoys me at the same time. On one hand, I always want something
artistic and nice to look at from day one. On the other hand, I want something that is a
good habitat for both fish and corals. I’m not exactly easy to please, so
I’ve mostly done my own aquascapes in the past. I often end up breaking them apart a few times until I finally get something I want.
This time, I got some help from a friend. After weeks of discussing ideas with him, I was finally delivered the scape you see below, while I was visiting my parents outside of Riyadh.
I wasn’t exactly sure about it at first. On one hand, it was actually what I had requested. A shape that
leans toward the back on both sides and pushes toward the front glass in the middle. Additionally, it should
rise higher in the center than on the sides, and higher in the back than in the front. The layout below is more or less what I was aiming to get.
Anyway,
I loaded it up in the car with a bunch of pillows and drove six hours back to Riyadh from my parents’ place.
A few hours after arriving, my
Chief Inspection & Quality Assurance Officer had to take a look to make sure it met his standards. That would be
Faris, my youngest son 
.
This is the
scape inside the aquarium.
Something about it just didn’t feel right to me.
So I decided, after consulting a bunch of my reefer friends, to
make some minor changes to it. One rock removed from here, a small piece taken from there… and before I knew it,
it was all rubble and dust. Things got
horribly out of control!
I tried putting things back together, but it just didn’t work out. My head was cloudy, and the vision I had for how I wanted this scape to look was shattered into a million pieces (pun intended).
The next day,
I decided to use the scape from the aquarium I bought. Coincidentally, it was also made by the same person who built the scape I had just destroyed. But first,
it needed a chlorine bath to clean it up and reset the rocks back to dry rock.
The scape was full of pests and hair algae, and I wasn’t about to introduce any of that into my new system.
This
scape came in three separate islands. Not exactly what I wanted, but I hoped that if I cleaned it up and placed the pieces side by side,
inspiration would eventually kick in.
Inspiration kick in indeed! After a few hours of adding small pieces here and there, with a reefer friend joining in to help,
things started coming together.
This was the final result.
I
covered the whole thing with mortar to unify the color and texture, and this is what I was left with.
I’m happy with the results.
