Rough week

[burrows14]

So last tuesday i noticed a couple of spots on a couple of my royal gramma so i upped the garlic extreme and hoped for the best. Things looked promising by thursday and everything looked happy. On friday night (6pm) i went to pick up my 120 gal that i bought off a fellow can reefer(smoking deal) loading it up was no problem but when i got to my place the\ nightmare started hahha. my dad helped me get the tank up my stairs and onto the stand and then he had to head home. So there i am all by myself to figure out how to put together and figure out what went where. i have never owned a large tank before so i was kind of in the dark on how to do all the plumbing. After a few hours of swearing and second guessing myself i thought i was done, I poured some water in the overflows to test the bulkheads. The left side was perfect but the rightside was leaking like a sive! turns out i warped one of the o-rings when i installed it i was very lucky because i was given a bunch of aquarium odds n ends from some friends that had just broke down their tank and in that pile of stuff i was given was 1 o-ring and it happend to be the exact one i needed!! I would have been hooped if i didnt have that cause not many hardware store are open at 1:00am on saturday morning! The bad news was that because of the long delay i had, most of the livestock that came with the tank started to die(emporer angel, filefish,hawkfish,sea cucumber). I finally got water in the tank at around 2am and then i plugged in the pump and just my luck i had 3 big leaks in the plumbing and only one was leaking into the sump!! so after mopping up and fiddling around i reduced the leaks to drips and got the tank running well enough to get the fish in. I went to bed around 3:45am and barley got a wink of sleep cause i was just waiting to hear a pop and the sound of gushing water lol. I woke up at 8am to the girlfriend telling me that there is a bunch of water on our floor(more mopping! YAY!!!!) It turned out to be just a minor leak and an easy fix. After all that I went to check on my biocube ad found that my royal gramma and chromis were lifeless on the bottom being feasted on by my hermits. By this point I was ready to pack it in and give up lol mainly cause i was pretty much had a sleepless night and was a Mr.cranky pants lol But dont worry! i regained my passion/obsession when i went to the lfs and started dreaming of all the possibilities!

After a week the 120 is doing great its going thru a mini cycle but everyone inside of it looks healthy and happy!

Hope i didnt waste your time with a pointless story but just wanted to shed some light on what this very novice fish fanatic went thru to enjoy his hobby lol


cheers
Ray