I truly consider this an honor to be July’s saltwater totm! My name is Dary aka as Dary421 on the forum. I have been the tackle shop manager at one of San Diego’s largest sport fishing companies for the last 40 + years. I have always been fascinated by the idea of maintaining a living thriving saltwater reef in your living room, of course 40 years ago there wasn’t many LFS that had saltwater setups.
I contacted seaworld and talked to the curator of their saltwater marine tank displays and he gave me some valuable advice and tips on getting started, the equipment compared to today’s standards was pretty prehistoric back then but I managed to start a marine tank and keep it well stocked thanks to the crews from our fishing fleet. Over the years my tank kinda faded by the wayside but got rejuvenated once I started vacationing and snorkeling in Hawaii about 15 years ago.
SETUP: My current system consists of a 135 gallon acrylic tank with a acrylic 45 gallon sump. I run a large seaside aquatic D.C. Skimmer with a reef octopus converted reactor with activated carbon, I also run a auto turf scrubber a gfo reactor,a artica cooler, a ‘razor’ led. Lighting system, an aquatic life Rodi system along with various power heads and a tunze ato which keeps my salinity level stable at 1.025
MAINTENANCE: I do a 15-20 gallon weekly water exchange using tropic marine salt, I usually do a monthly Exchange of the carbon and gfo or whenever I feel it’s needed. I feed The inhabitants every other day with a combination of mysis and sheets or nori seaweed
Coral: I like the idea of having a combination tank consisting of chalices,mushrooms, acros, monticapricornices and a wide variety of LPS, SPS and soft corals too.
INHABITANTS: Fish wise, I have a beautiful powder blue tang, a scopace tang, a foxface, sixline wrasse along with a couple of blennies and a numerous assortment of snails,shrimps and some serpent stars.
CONCLUSION: I truly love the saltwater marine hobby it’s totally addicting to me, I’ve learned so much from my forum friends over the years, you’ve got to be a plumber,electrical engineer, marine biologist, and all around geek to keep a system up and running over the years, I guess if it was easy to do it just wouldn’t be as much fun nor as rewarding.
