Wow..almost 4 months have gone by...and they've been a lousy 4 months for my pond.
The good news is I found homes for about 70 fish that had spawned in the pond over the past 2 seasons. The bad news is I lost a bunch of my Koi starting shortly after that. The fish looked great, but they were dying, no symptoms that we could see. I still have one in my freezer that is getting shipped off to a University for a necropsy to try and figure it out, so that maybe it won't happen again.. Hopefully whatever it was has now passed as I haven't lost a fish in almost 3 weeks now. But while it was happening I lost 2 of my biggest/oldest Koi (and about 12 smaller fish) and that was heartbreaking for me.
I'm continuing to feed an antibacterial pellet as they have less likelyhood of impacting the balance in the pond and I'll probably continue to do so for another week due to all of the new water.
The other bad news is the pond sprung a leak.
Over the course of the last 2 weeks I've had to add approximately 5 or 6,000 (yes, thousand) gallons of water. Last night things went critical and I decided to bite the bullet today and gather up the stuff I would need to make repairs.
A gallon of Stress Coat, a kiddie pool and a new $400 liner....ouch...and a vacation day spent in the yard instead of on the boat. Nuts!
Took a few pics in between moving fish and rocks...
Early in the day..need to drain the water that was still in the pond..
I'd taken the fish and smaller plants out and put them into a 6' kiddie pool...nice green water eh? lol
Almost empty...there was a nasty puncture low in the liner that I didn't get a pic of..I put a big patch on it and left the old liner in place and put the new one directly over it. Swept up all the gunk off the bottom and removed it..
Finally got the new liner in and started to put all of the rocks around the edges...
The milkcrate with the cattails were added back and the hoses got cranked up..
I was seriously running out of daylight by this point and had to get the filters running again (they were isolated for the hours this took to do and each was oxygenated by placing the pump inside of the filters to keep the bacteria alive), and needed to get the plants and fish back into the pond.
By the time the last fish was moved from the kiddie pool it was about 9:45pm (started this oddessey in the morning...). The water finally finished filling about 11:30 tonight..so I'll have to wait until the morning to see if the fish are still ok but I expect they should be (fingers crossed!!..and I have been peeking with a flashlight) I'll try and grab a quick pic before I head off to the boat in the morning...ahhh back to vacation time
I smooshed a few of my plants while doing this and the crud that came off the bottom of the pond rates right up there with skimmate as far as smell..so maybe I'll visit the yard again after we have a good hard rain...lol