Yeah, you are fine. Give it another day or 2. After it all has settled. blow all the dust off the rocks. If you want, you could vacuum the sand, but carefully. If you have fine sand, it will be more difficult, but if you have crushed coral, it should be alot easier. Just get a small vacuum kit from the lfs, or if you already have one for your FW tanks. Just don't suck all the sand up, just dust. I'm sure you wiil lose some sand in the process. In my experience with this, I noticed that the water got more cloudy when the fish would stir it up or when I moved some rock, so I actually prefer NOW to rinse the sand before I pour it in the tank. If you want to avoid this, just vacuum out alot of your sand into a bucket and just rinse it out in the bucket. Use the sprayer part on your kitchen sink, hit the sand with some water, shake it around, carefully dump the cloudy water, repeat. It is important to do this before your sand actually starts to build up any bacteria or other little critters from your LR make a home out of it. Some people may disagree with me, and to those people: I may be wrong, so if you disagree, tell me why because this is also of some concern to myself.
Fishman- Tell your dad to chill. He sounds like my dad... Just explain it to him in a way so that he will have no clue as to what you are saying. Use a lot of technical terms-Tell him about the whole cycling process.. That always works when the wife is giving me $h1t about wasting money on the tank. Good luck!
