HOLY! You weren't kidding when you said hoarding. I am sure its not a nightmare though :biggrin:.

I also have to say that 90% of my saltwater tanks were purchased and sold in the canreef for sale section... so thank you canreef!

my first tank looked like ****. 90g worth of ****. That is all, carry on.

Well maybe my son is doing ok, his tank looks pretty good (maybe not to a discerning "expert" eye, like some on this forum). But no algae, nothing has died (knock on wood), and his levels are pretty good…

He's smart enough to know that we wouldn't "sponsor" his upgrade if it were any other way :)

Will be ordering his new tank today or tomorrow :)

Ya, it has definitely gotten A LOT easier to set up a decent tank these days. You can pretty much buy an all-in-one off the shelf tank, plug it in, dump in some water, salt, corals, fish and you're done, with decent results to boot. Such conveniences didn't exist when I set up my first tank many many many many many moons ago :-)

I started off with guppies in a margarine container that I bought from Woolco, I was about 8 years old at the time. Once my mom found them we upgraded to a bowl, and it was all uphill from there lol. My first Marine tank was a 108 gal failure, now I have my 60 gal, and I'm pretty happy with it :)

How do you guys remember all these tanks? I don't remember all mine. I'm not even sure that the one I remember as my first one was really my first one. :o

Of course?? I had my first tank when I was 11, and my parents never sponsored my tanks. :lol:

I have pictures of all the tanks I have owned in a big folder, individually named with the size! Right down do my first ones!

Here is the Betta Tank that started it all!

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3...a/SDC11518.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3...a/SDC11534.jpg

Guess I've been a slacker:

1. 8 gallon Biocube
2. 10 gallon
3. 75 gallon
4. 2.5ish gallon pico
5. 34 gallon Red Sea Max
6. 120 gallon sitting dry waiting to be plumbed and filled with goodies :)

My first fw tank that I owned myself was a heavily, heavily overstocked 5 gallon that I bought with some money my parents left us when they went on vacation (ok, it was for food, but I wanted a fish tank). Boy did the LFS owners see me coming cause they loaded up this unsuspecting kid with a brand new 5 g and about 30 small tropical fish and sent him on his way (by bus) home to figure it out before he killed everything.

Fortunately, when my dad came back, he saw the tank, took me to Fraser Aquarium and bought me a new 33g. That was back when I was a weee little lad of eight years old.

My first sw tank was in the early 80s (around 1980-81) and it was a seahorse tank. 10 gallons with no live rock (what's live rock???) and I kept the wc seahorse alive for almost a year on live brine shrimp that I would cycle out to Main Aquarium in Vancouver to buy every week. Then there was a huge storm in San Francisco and all the brine shrimp that they usually collected for the petshop trade were washed out to sea and the poor little guy eventually starved :cry::cry: cause I couldn't raise adult brine shrimp from eggs fast enough. 30+ years later, still traumatized (jk) but really, still remember that terrible feeling of hoping a new brine shrimp shipment would come in time and being disappointed each time.:cry:

My first two bigger sw tanks was in the mid-80s. Had a 33g for a Volitan lionfish (got it at 3" and raised to over 12" before he poisoned me while I was cleaning his glass and I sold him. The other tank was a 110g with a Passer King Angel, Smooth Horn Shark, Moorish Idol, and Snowflake Moray Eel. 110g was the largest tank you could get back then and I used to hand-feed all these fish with squid and smelts. Wow, that was 30 years ago. Ok, now I feel old.

Anthony