Happy new year! & Early Jan update

Happy new year and, I hope you’ve had a great holiday period.

We downed tools for a couple of weeks over the holidays and it was great to take a break, but back to it now… and the to do list is too long for my liking.

The current priority is to put fixes into place so that we can accelerate the tosai growth - which has been too slow for a few reasons....

The first, is that our air source heat pump has broken and I won’t have the spare until next week at the earliest. This means, the water temperature hasn’t been high enough for probably a month or so now.

And, we are also growing on too many kohakus. The side effect of a better than normal spawning season last year… and I made the decision to hold more tosai than normal into the winter on the basis that I was setting up a new tank that would increase our growing on capacity. And, therefore, with this new tank I'd be able to take advantage of a better than normal year of spawnings.

The new tank is in place, and the filtration is all there. But I have a leak in the bio section which is proving really difficult to solve. I applied the 4th fix (!) on Thursday night and as of tonight (Saturday night) - the fix seems to be holding . yes!!!!! and, i have started up the water pumps and also the heating - to get this tank up to temperature.

If the tank holds up, then we'll split our tosai from the early summer spawnings across the new tank and the existing ones - probably merging the spawnings and separating the koi by size.

The other major job is to select through the small koi from the late summer spawning and that’s what I have planned for tomorrow.

They’re now small koi and desperately need thinning out. This will be their second selection. And, this is from our trusty okawa female but this time using a slightly different males mix to normal – just one of my dianichi pair, plus a sakai male. And, this is the first selection when I should get an idea as to whether I can see any differences in the babies as a result of that change to the males.

If I can get through the selections, the tank repairs and then distribute the tosai between the growing on systems in the next week or two – then we should still have our usual size of tosai ready for the showing season this year – albeit, they might be ready early May, rather than March / April.

And, the other news is that we dipped into the females tank to sample the sizes and quality of the nissai – and overall, they’re looking good and the fish from ‘sharkey’s jun 2016 spawning in particular are doing very well – and a few seem to have excellent growth potential.

A random selection of a few from the late summer 16 spawning

I've shown this all the way from when it was a fry... now 51cm, and probably a male based on the body shape. nevertheless, i have a soft spot for this one. the white skin is really good and the red is thick.

Here’s some video footage of the few we bowled up - measurements from last weekend:


51cm




51cm


this is in my top 4, and may even be my top nisai - but I'll specify which one is my top one, when I go through all the nisai and review the top 4 together.


56cm


great growth on 'marmite' - and the red is thickening up.


50cm



55cm


the second largest... and I expect this one to continue to grow well too.


And a sample of smaller nisai from the late summer ’16 spawning.

41,42 and 43cm