2nd selection completed this evening

Just finished second selection and have a few pictures to share. It's been good fun - Amanda and I had a go with our new seine net and got the knack of it fairly quickly. It took us two go's to net up the pond before we had all the fish, and we'll be quicker next time now we know what to do.

It's been a long evening, so I'll get straight to the pics - there are some of Amanda and I doing the selections, and a few of the more interesting looking koi too.


I moved all the koi into this inspection bowl after catching them in the seine net. I didnt count them but I guess there are around 500 there. The other two inspection bowls are empty to start with and during the evening I put the keepers into one bowl and the discards into the other. The keepers went back into their growing on pond, and the discards went into another pond - the "tea cup", where we'll hold them until we move them on.

Heads torches - if you don't have one, then get one! You can basically do anything at night with one one - even koi selections. It would have been much better to do this during daylight ofcourse, but the nights are drawing in and I didnt want to leave it any longer. This weekend is the Kangei Garden Show so my next opportunity would have been in another 10 days, and that's leaving it too long. So, head torch it was!

There was debate over some of the koi. In the end, we've been fairly stringent about what we keep, and we only kept around 30 to 50 I think. Didnt count them. There were some that I had high hopes for but on closer inspection had a fault like red in the pec or tail. In most cases I selected out fish like that, but I gave one or two a second chance if they had other features that were particularly good.

Smaller than the average, but clean nose, and fins. Pretty pattern. Will the red break over the shoulder?
Nice pattern, clean pecs, white gills. And a good body shape and size. Fingers crossed the red in the dorsal fin recedes a bit.




Here's a good example of one where we gave it a pass into the next round even though there's some red in the tail. It's got a nice pattern, and the red in the tail might recede.

Top left - could be a bit too busy, and the red on the head needs to come through more. Difficult to know how it will look in a month or two, so we kept it.

The pattern didnt particularly excite me, but it's got a white nose, white gill plates and white fins. The one step has notches in it along the length of the hi plate, so perhaps a pleasing one step pattern will emerge.



There was some variety in body shapes across the batch we selected through, but I was pleased a lot of them came up nicely, like this one.

Since my last blog, I've been updating the filtration in the males and females ponds, added the new "tea cup" pond to the males filtration system and been monitoring the fry being reared in the outdoor ponds. There's lots more to update you on.