In my very limited experience (6 years give or take) I have finally come to therms with a couple facts. The first being that we all fool ourselves by saying this is a hobby. In reality it is no more than a bad investment.....and a burning passion. The second thing I have learned is loss seems to sadly be a rite of passage.
We start out, and things are going well. Then we get complacent,cocky or we "over tinker" trying to tease that extra shot of color, or there are dosing pump failures, power failures, disease, bugs.Whatever the caause, things suddenly go to hell. The Coral Gods have stepped in to remind you who is really in control.
I have failed far more often than I have succeeded. But instead of throwing in the towel the first time I contemplated such a thing as I stared at my now shredded, fishless display, and coral strewn about it as though I had let my kids swim in the tank from removing fish for Ich treatment, man I was crushed.
Then I realized that I did enjoy the "hobby", that I enjoyed the challenge, and as so many have said, the time and money invested to that point hardly justified walking away. I then started re-assessing everything and started looking at my issues as an opportunity to do things to the tank I wasn't able to do before. Change mobile inhabitants, rearrange the rock the way I wanted, change my sump design, and.....hell.....why not just go to a bigger tank??? LMMFAO
Failure is only a negative if we have not learned from it. The single greatest resource, is other reefers, and their painful accounts of "life gone wrong". Take their experiences and learn from them. Learn from your mistakes. Find the common threads to failure, crashes etc and avoid them. For me, it is the complete abandonment of dosing pumps, as they seem to be the single largest contributors to crashes. Quarantine, Quarantine, and then Quarantine some more.
Most important is to always remember that none of us is immune to disaster, none of us are infallible, and we all walk that razor's edge while we try to "play master creator" in our own little oceans.That is what keeps me going, the delicate balance, the sheer fleeting pleasure of a good result, the pain of failure....it all goes hand in hand. That is reefing. We are all "that special kind of crazy". That is why we reef. Chin up. Good Luck
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Cheers
Gary
604-319-0317
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