tkhawaja

Just picked up my rock from J&L - 140lbs worth.

Looks pretty good, lots of colour and shapes (couple of big pieces per box, lots of smaller ones as well). Doesnt smell yet, I guess that means its fresh?

I'll post pics tonite... I managed to take 2 pics before my cam ran out of batteries....

That's good news for me. Maybe I won't have to cure it long. Hopefully the one extra day before it gets into the curing tub won't have much die off. Oooo, who knows maybe I can put it in the tank within a few days!

I have one white thing I think was a sponge on this one rock... it is huge. Must be 6 inches wide, circular and unfortunately, very dead :(

I think this rock qualifies as porous - it has lotsa caverns and holes in it.

I tossed mine into the tank right away, I have nothing else in there anyways. Now its just a matter of fine tuning everything and hopefully this rock will cure pretty quickly.

When i got my rock home it was a bit smelly so i've put it in a seperate container with several powerheads and the skimmer. I also put in several of my large already cured rocks. hopefully that will helps things along. I had a huge piece which had several things I was forced to cut out. I hated doing it but whatever it was definately would not have survived. Pictures will be posted once the water clears up a bit.

I guess the problem is not being able to select the right pieces ( shape,size and what's on it) when doing mailorder rock. The rock is always expensive and when you open the box thats what you get. You win sum and loose most of them.
Sorry to here but it sounds like you are very unhappy with your order. Bindare Donedat.

My two cents;
Asthetically, rock is just rock (unless you have tons of living caulera to cleanup). Its what one plants on it that makes the tank look appealing.
Once you have your corals placed and are trying to find a small place to plant a few more frags, you won't give a rats a.. what the rock looks like. Coraline will grow given proper care and can even become a major pain cleaning the glass.

On the contrary, I'm VERY happy with my order from J & L. The rock has very interesting shapes and all kinds of things growing on them. I was just sorry that I had to cut and scrape off some macro and corals because they would just decompose and pollute the water. I'm sure their spores / "roots" are still around and will eventually come back. The snails I ordered were double bagged for safety and then packed in foam peanuts.

I have to chime in and agree with Tahir - every piece of rock I got looks just as covered as the pictures on the J&L website. Most pieces honestly have even more coverage and growth! I have several pieces of algae that are still alive and a bunch of other stuff that seems to be doing well...

Hopefully some of it survives...

I also got a couple of very nice pieces... two of the pieces I picked up actually have a hole right thru the middle and are quite large - they looks great.

Also, I am local and when I went to pick up my rock, they just loaded two boxes into my trunk - I didnt get to pick n search thru all the boxes for the perfect pieces... and I got to J&L just as they were unloading the boxes from their truck.