When I close my eyes, all I see are 1000's of tiny kohakus

Spending hours looking at pan net after pan net of small red and white fish is doing strange things to my brain! All I can see when I go to sleep at night are 1000's of small kohaku swimming around!

My experience last year is paying dividends though, and I'm much more confident about the process and the decisions that need to be made this time around.

Fry in the white cage net are from the fry pond. The bucket is filled up with water to around 1 cm below the top. Then, I take a pan net and catch around 10 fry from the white cage net, move the pan net to the top of the bucket, like you see in the picture above. then I'll spend time reviewing each of the koi and I move any I want to keep into the main tank, and the remainder go into the black cage net.
Glasses on! The fry are small and I'm looking for tiny details to make my selection decisions
I got through most of the selections last weekend, and one more full day on it this weekend will probably see it done.

I'm happy with the quality though. The keepers selected last weekend are are growing like stink and as the fish grow from 1 inch to 2 inches, the patterns become much easier to make out and it's still early days but one or two are quite exciting... It may only take another week or two before I'm ready for second selection.

While that's in play, I'm also preparing for another set of spawnings.

We re-lined the fry pond last weekend, and it's now full and fertilised - I'm interested to see how quickly it cycles at this time of year compared to April when i cycled it the first time.



I'm aiming for spawnings next weekend - ie, in 9 days time. And I will chose spawnings based on how the females are looking on the day, I want to spawn the showa's but there's also my shiro female so I'll hold that in reserve. Although I do have a yamabuki and shusui set, they are lower down in my thinking - partly because I'm more interested in showa as a variety but also because I only have 1 yamabuki and shusui male and my preference is to run with two males.