January 2008 Meeting Recap and pics

Date: 1/03/08    Attendance: Over 100 adults!!!!

 

This club meeting was a super success!!!!  Thanks to everyone pitching in with corals, great local store sponsors, fraggers, and people with money in hand, we raised some much needed funds for the club.  This will certainly help us to bring in more world class speakers and produce some great meetings in the next few months.  We started the night with 55 paid members (which is amazing for starting a new year) and sold another ~28 memberships (around 40 membership total this week!  Way to go everyone! 

We over filled the parking lot, and that was something to complain about.  By 7:00pm we had overflow parking into the park and the high school, our largest turnout in a year. 

 

Thanks to so many coral donors!!!!  We had several club members (around 15) donate corals for the meeting.  Plus some stores kicked with donations including The Aquarium, Aquatic Dreams, BST Aquatics, Fish 4 U, Reef Kingdom.

This month we featured Greg Wilke (PinnerReef).  This tank is an 8 gallon corner pentagon.  What is most unusual is that Greg built the tank himself (he previously worked in the glass business).  It was great to see what can be done with some imagination, especially in only 8 gallons.

We had 6 corals for a silent auction.  These corals were picked out as the best corals that we just couldn't bring ourselves to frag. 

We had three corals used for demonstrations.  They included mushrooms, finger leather, and a tilesaw used to cut up a moon coral. 

There were hundreds, yes hundreds of coral frags for sale.  These frags were labled with a two letter symbol (like NN for Neon Nephthea) to help make buying easy.  Also, they were color coordinated for sps, lps, and softies. 

Thanks to the Aquaterrial Education Station for allowing us to use their place for all the prep work.  And boy was there some prep work.  Lets start by mixing up 50 gallons of water.  Then transporting some of that from West Jordan to Centerville.  Have you ever taken 100 frag bags and 100 rubberbands and said "here we go."?  Think your hands are sore from trying rubberbands, that is nothing compared to coral and invert stings.  This year a few people were wearing gloves, although not the main fragger himself (Shane H).  After Jake's trip to the InstaCare last year from a fireworm incident you'd think Shane H would be more careful. 

For several days leading up to the event corals were being collected (Thanks Sukie!) and plan were made on how best to run the show.  It took 7 people 5 hours to get all the prefragging done.  Thanks to Shane H, Will, Jamison, Adam, Jake, Shane S, Corey for giving up a day to do this. 

Next month we'll feature Dr. Fred Lipschultz as our special banquet speaker.  Currently we have about 15 tickets remaining.  Please paypal $20 per ticket to the club if you are interested in going.

 

Adam

 

 

Shane Heil cutting the frags.

 

 

 

Will and Jamison bagging away.

 

 

 

With Silcox the full team in production.

 

 

Jake works his magic with a hammer and screwdriver. 

 

 

 

The tables at the meeting with frags just waiting for hobbyists (one of the big perks to joining about any hobbyist club).

 

 

Packed house.  I couldn't get a good photo of everyone, or a good photo of the screen.  So this is an inbetween photo.  Notice on the slide that Heil is thanking and listing all of the wonderful stores who donated to our event.

 

 

Mike

 

LOL I was about to recommend that this type of "summary" be put up after every meeting. I thought it was a great idea, Adam. Thanks!

Adam