Christy's Reef

Today was tank maintenance day. I ran out of salt last week and got lazy and skipped my weekly water change. Man it was nasty in there!! Anyway, I guess I'll be doing double duty on it this weekend. I had bought a bucket of Seachem salt but I'm not really sure whether I'm all that thrilled with it as I've had a number of frags go through some sort of STN. They take days and days to lose all their tissue. My A. hoeksmai finally kicked it today after about a week of downslide. Total bummer as that one was pretty damned striking and I babied the hell out of it when I got it as it wasn't in the best of shape. Now I see my pink milli is starting to go along with two others. So far 3 have totally croaked. Hopefully I can manage to figure out WTF is going on in my tank and save the last few.

So now I'm back to Kent salt. After that fiasco with the alkalinity I was a bit leery but after testing it, it checked out at 10.9 dkH. Works for me. I did a 15g water change today and will probably do another one. Thats what I get for being lazy.

So I was up at some ungodly hour this am. I hate that, especially on a weekend when I should be sleeping in till noon (just kidding). Anyway, I took the opportunity to check out the tank with a flashlight and LO AND BEHOLD I FOUND THE BASTARD CRAB!!! Well, one of many I'm sure. I could see his little legs sticking out of his hidey hole. So I plugged it with putty! :P I know, I know, I'm a horrible person and I'm going to hell. No doubt I'll still be duking it out with that crab while I'm down there, oh and the other one I froze a month ago :P Well I guess its one (more) down and who knows how many to go. I really do sincerely hope this is the last one. I'm getting tired of flea bitten looking frags. I'm sure the frags are tired of being flea bitten too.

Well I suppose its "officially" the start of summer. I hooked up my chiller today. I'm not really sure whether people just leave them hooked up all year and don't have them on or how that all works. I suppose I should look into it, cuz its damn near impossible to get all the water out of them and a bunch of rusty looking bits shot out when I flushed it. Lucky me, some of them are now in my tank as apparently 5 mins worth of flushing didn't get the job done :( Good thing I'm doing that water change tomorrow. Perhaps I'll be doing one the next day as well. Good thing I also have that new bucket of salt. *sigh*