wow a lot of awesome story's guess it's time to add another
well in 1994 me and my family moved to Kure Beach N.C
me and my son loved fishing off the pier , he always caught the odd fish puffers , and a few others I still to this day have no idea what they were ,
anyhow we were out driving one day and my son said stop dad,
it was a yard sale they had a complete 55 gal set up tank stand filter ect , $25. who could turn that down lol . after we got it home my son said can we keep the fish I catch in it , not knowing anything about salt water I said sure , so next day we walked over to the beach filled 5 5 gallon buckets with sand . got home added it to the tank , than I was thinking what am I going to do for making salt water , well you guessed it we went back to the beach filled up our buckets with water and put it in the tank ,
the next day we went out for a walk to find some rocks ,shells and what ever we could find , My son found 2 crabs so we brought them home added them in tank along with rocks and stuff ,
we went fishing that weekend son caught 2 puffers so we brought them home added them to the tank ,
he also caught a baby sting ray we put him in tank too. now that was a mistake water everywhere non stop
added a few mud minnows every week for the fish to eat me and my son had a blast ,
than one day went to pet store and saw all the colorful salt water fish , we looked at each other with blank stares ,
went home caught all the fish we had in tank put back in ocean
than you guessed it we were hooked
cleaned out tank started fresh with clean sand and synthetic sea salt and we were on our way the only thing we kept was all the rock we found in the ocean . kept everything going till me and the wife separated in 02 . my son got it all
10 years later I'm hooked again
Need I say more