Bank holiday weekend in pictures

We spent Sunday selecting through the August 16 spawning - looking for fish to show at this weekend's South of England koi show; and also, selecting keepers, and ones to move on.

This is what you look like when you're socking a large koi, and she decides to jet propel a massive amount of water in your direction. We were moving fish between ponds... after selecting through the whole of the August '16 spawning. The spawning itself has provides us with the highest average quality of koi achieved so far. but, we didn't find anything good enough from the spawning to take to the show this weekend!

Populating the second of our outdoor fry rearing ponds:

I caught up the hatchlings from the 3 step female spawning and moved them into the bottom fry pond, outside.

that's around 1k to 2k hatchlings in that bowl, right there..

to work out how many are in the green/white bowl - I took a sample of the fry/water mix, in a measuring cup. counted the hatchlings in the known small quantity of water, and the extrapolated for the volume of the green/white bowl.

there was a 3 C temperature difference between the ponds, so I floated the bags for a while before releasing the hatchlings.

And finally, selecting which koi we would take to the South of England koi show this weekend:

We also spent some time working out which fish we are taking to the South of England show this weekend

We had a tough job selecting the best ones to take. but thankfully, one or two really stood out,

we took pictures to catalogue the fish we're taking to the show... with hand gestures to indicate the show size. I have better pictures of the ones we're taking, which I'll share once all the fish are benched for the show.

And then, the clearing up. That in itself took a couple of hours.

And, jet washing cage nets and spawning ropes to set ourself up for the next round of spawnings - due in july.