Sorry it has been so long since I last logged on. As you can imagine, moving cross country has been quite the fiasco.
So I loaded the fish and corals in the coolers Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday morning, we loaded it all in the car and left around 6 AM. The aerators worked brilliantly.
I only had to change the batteries once, on Thursday night. We left the coolers in the car all night both nights and the night in Texas got down into the 50's. The water in the coolers stayed in the mid-70's the whole trip. We arrived in Grand Rapids on Friday afternoon and unloaded the car, but because I had to close on the house and go buy a new 75 gallon temporary tank, everything stayed in the coolers until Saturday.
So, all in all, everything was in the coolers from Tuesday afternoon until Saturday morning.
Now, for the best part...EVERYTHING MADE IT!
There was one harrowing night, where a hole I made in the crate let all of the bioballs into my Vlamingi's cage, but he was ok, although not too happy.
Now, for the sad part. Saturday night, after the tank was all set up (protein skimmer, Fluval FX5, heater, lights, etc.), the fish were settled in and had their first meal in 5 days. So we went out to dinner. When we got back, my dad noticed that the angel was dead (he was an extremely healthy fish).
In the time, I got him out, I started noticing that some of the other fish were not doing so well. They started dropping like flies. We tested everything, but all readings were normal. We added new water to try and help. After losing some more fish
, the tank made a turn for the positive, and the other fish started to recover.
All in all, I lost a Lamarck's Angel, a Powder Brown Tang, a Yellow-Eye Tang, a Coral Banded Shrimp (one of a pair), and a pair of Anthias.
That was over 3 weeks ago. The good news is that everything else is doing great. All of the rest of the fish are healthy and the corals have all opened back up.
So it seems that I got down the move part. I'm not really sure what happened that night that I lost the fish after I got here. It almost seemed like the tank went through a mini-cycle, fast enough that I didn't catch any abnormal readings. Whatever it was, definitely stressed out the entire tank. I think that if I hadn't added some new water, it might have been worse.
Thanks for all of the support. I definitely owe you all some pictures, which I will post as soon as I find my camera. I took some of the coolers packed up before we left and I'll take some of my temporary setup.