Hello Reef2reef! This thread is long overdue here at R2R… hop on for the ride. Many of you may have seen my systems on the “other board” and it’s about time I share here! I’ll post updates to this thread along the way… I’m a long time hard core hobbyist that got my first saltwater tank at age 11 after having a few freshwater tanks… had the house filled with tanks by high school, and yada yada yada… I’m now 43! I know… as Jerry Seinfeld says you can’t yada yada the best part, so I’ll show a bunch of that yada yada in this thread. We all know moving sucks, especially for a reefer, but seven years ago my wife and I built our forever home, and I built my forever reef. My kids are now 12 and 15, and we know how that goes in terms of keeping busy. Many know me as a hardcore SPS guy, with my childhood nickname and username tied to many SPS pieces I’ve owned through the years. You can read many of my reefing philosophies, and about my old systems in two past TOTMs I’ve had on the other board. Over the past fifteen years or so I’ve spoken at clubs and conferences in over twenty states mainly on SPS and angelfish, including four past MACNAs, and have met many of you reading this. Whether we’ve met face to face, or in threads in the past, it’s been such a pleasure… as my wife says I do not do it for the money… it’s all about the passion… so cheers to anyone reading this… because while we come from around the world and may be different in many ways… we all share the same passion… whether you like it or not… you clicked on this thread and are reading this… you my friend, have the passion… : )
To start, this is a system I set up in 2001 just after my wife and I got married in our first one bedroom apartment… a standard 10 gallon that was affectionately known as my “kitchen nano” and was profiled back then on the nano reef board. For those of you with Tony Vargas’ book “The Coral Reef Aquarium” this was the first and smallest reef system profiled in the book. I kept Tridacnid clams and Acropora among many other things, and to this day I still own the Solomon Islands percula clownfish I purchased nearly 20 years ago and a few of the corals. One cool tidbit about this tank was that the display acted as the sump for the refugium above… I can do an entire thread on this system (and did back in the day), but I’ll keep it short to get to bigger things…
Front shot…
Top shot…
To start, this is a system I set up in 2001 just after my wife and I got married in our first one bedroom apartment… a standard 10 gallon that was affectionately known as my “kitchen nano” and was profiled back then on the nano reef board. For those of you with Tony Vargas’ book “The Coral Reef Aquarium” this was the first and smallest reef system profiled in the book. I kept Tridacnid clams and Acropora among many other things, and to this day I still own the Solomon Islands percula clownfish I purchased nearly 20 years ago and a few of the corals. One cool tidbit about this tank was that the display acted as the sump for the refugium above… I can do an entire thread on this system (and did back in the day), but I’ll keep it short to get to bigger things…
Front shot…
Top shot…