Awards Won At The 2024 Great British Koi Show
Adam Byer Koi Farm Aragoke … is now an award winning breeding line 🙂
Congratulations to Mark Lester who picked up this Aragoke from our online Aragoke release in March earlier this year.
(Pictures take at the time of the tosai release, in March '24)
And it’s won a really good competitive placing coming 2nd out of 4 koi at this weekends Great British Koi Show !
This is also Mark’s first ever koi show , and he’s also scored a 1st place (out of 3 koi) with an Asagi from us , increasing the number of awards our Asagi are achieving on the show circuit and further establishing the credentials of our breeding line of Asagi. Both awards are against tough competition.
Matthew Savage won a suite of awards with our koi, including:
1st in size 2 Hikari muji out of 3 koi with one of our Mukashi Ogons from the Opaline line. And 2nd in size 3 Hikari muji out of 2 koi with one of our Yamabuki Ogons from the new Izumiya female we spawned last year. That makes our new Yamabuki line an award winning line, and adds to the awards from our Opaline line of Mukashi Ogons.
Matt also scored a 1st in size 2 Asagi/Shusui; this koi did the same job for Matt at the BKKS National Koi Show earlier this year against tough competition; but last weekend's Great British Koi Show, there were no other koi in this size/variety class.It's always great to take a 1st placing - but obviously the 1st place this koi won at the BKKS National against tough competition is more notable of the two awards Matt won with this Asagi this year.
Matt also scored an excellent result with a Torazo Sanke that we supplied Matt over the winter. You may remember our news about bringing some Torazo sanke females in from Japan with a view to breeding from them in a year or two's time. We imported 4, and have supplied 1 to Matt - and that Sanke has not only won 1st in size 4 sanke out of 9 koi, but it also placed 2nd in size 2 overall... that's against every other koi in size 4. Tantalisingly close to a Young Champion award. Matt's Sanke has bags of potential, and scoring such a good result so early is unexpected, but certainly excellent news. The body Matt's developing on this Sanke will have scored well with the judges, and the whole scale style sanke sumi is another excellent feature. One of the risks Matt took with this koi, was the lack of sumi on the shoulder when he bought it from us. A couple of sumi patches are now apparent on the shoulder, and it looks like Matt's taken the right compromise at the point of purchase, and focussed on body - which so far, is working well.
One of the reasons we bought from Torazo is because of the special impression the farm left on me, on my first trip to Japan in 2015. As a Kohaku fan, Torazo's pond of newly harvested Kohaku was a highlight of that trip. I took some photos and video at the time which you can see on the blog, here: https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/blogs/blog/2nd-day-in-japan-amazing-again?_pos=2&_sid=f6f3fe82a&_ss=r. Last winter, we also imported some special Kohaku nisai male Kohaku's from Torazo which we plan to use in our Kohaku breeding lines. Torazo is famous for their Sanke, one of the original Sanke bloodlines.
This year we've started to fill gaps in the sales room with imported koi from Japan, and we are thrilled for one of our customers to have scored such a great result with one of our imported koi, at such an early stage in the import side of our business. Matt's Sanke has great potential, and we look forward to seeing what Matt achieves with this special koi over the coming years.
