Life (aka work) as of Lately

My body can't really decide on what time zone it wants to operate on. I've been getting tired and waking up at weird hours. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I really only got about one nights rest spread out over 5 days while I was in Minnesota for the UMKC's Third annual koi show. Which by the way was quite a fun show, for various reasons...

Back in Japan however, we have started the harvesting of tosai. So everyday consists of going to the ponds we are pulling that day to seine them 3 times to catch as many of the koi we can. Then a final cull and sorting of tategoi and fish we'll sell will take place. Lastly we completely drain the pond(s) to catch any of the koi that avoided being caught by the seine net. We're averaging about 4 ponds a day.

Once all the ponds we are harvesting for that day are culled and sorted or we run out of box nets to put the koi in after we seine, we'll load them into a transport tank on one of the trucks. Sanbusho is the designated tosai house, so we'll unload all of the tosai there. Sanbusho is made up of 5 seperate houses in one area. There is a vinyl house with 6 tanks, and then there is houses A through D clustered together. House A has 7 tanks, B has 5, C has 4, and D also has 4 tanks. At the main entrance in House D there is also 2 small tanks we use to prep tosai for shipping. The vinyl house is where all the tategoi are kept throughout the winter, and the rest of the houses is where we will store the fish that are for sale. While unloading the sale able tosai we'll usually separate them by size.

With a little over 50 tosai ponds and only 12 ponds into the harvest it looks like we'll be pulling ponds up till about the end of this month. Once we are finished pulling the tosai ponds, work will start on prepping for the big fish harvest. Which usually starts around the 15th of October, we've got some busy days ahead of us.

Devin's Pond

Second & Third Cull

The second cull on my kohakus' was undertaken on the 30th of August. After receiving help pulling the seine net from the Boss, I set about culling. This time was nothing like the last, many of the fry didn't turn out well, so a lot of them were thrown away. I started out with the 1,800 selected in the last cull, and culled down to 105 fish With about 13 of them having any chance of turning out alright. The fry were about 4-6 cm at the time of culling, and quite of few of them had deformed heads. I'd figured there would have been around 300 koi picked out if they would have developed well, but I culled strictly, so that might be a factor.

The third cull took place just a week after the second cull, on the 6th of September. Ideally I would have wanted a wait a couple extra days to cull. Since it is starting to cool down and the growing season is coming to an end, I opted to hurry up and do a third cull to open up more room for keepers to grow out. I selected 82 fish to keep out of the previous 105, there was a lot of Aka & Shiro Muji thrown away. I believe they must have escaped the net last time I pulled the pond because it didn't look like any of the fry really lost their hi at all. This time around there was 16 koi I believe have a chance at developing well, all within the 6-10 cm range. There was a couple fish I didn't recognize, so its possible they were missed by the seine net in the previous pull too. Soon the tosai harvest will start and all them will be moved indoors for the winter. I think around the 20th or so of the month I'll be harvesting my fry. At that time I will be doing a final cull before they're moved to their own tank for the winter.

Mark Gardener has been following the development of my kohaku, the second cull is featured in the first issue of his new eMagazine Niigata Nishikigoi Digest, it can be viewed at www.niigata-nishikigoi.com