Koi Page

What’s happening in the Koi Pond

Below are some of the koi we have had in the past.

November 9, 2009
This is the time of year that the koi really start to slow down. Since I do not have to be over at my office every day now that I am retired, I go in every two or three days just to make sure everything is OK. This past weekend (November 4,5, and 6) we had our local Piedmont Koi and Watergarden Society show so I did not go over to check on my koi pond for about 4 days.

What a surprise when I got there. I know that I have a heron or two and I am pretty sure I have a raccoon that plays around with my plants trying to catch the small koi that are in each of my plant containers. The first thing that I saw was the empty blue tank that was full of babies. On Saturday at the koi show, I had been bragging about the nice fish that had spawned in this tank in May.

Here is what happened. We had a sale in May and I had placed all of our smaller fish up to about 6-7 inches in this tank overnight. These fish were bagged in the morning of the sale and at the end of the day, I pumped all the water back into the main pond. If you have not figured it out, water cost almost a penny a gallon so I did not see any reason to waste 700 gallons of perfectly good water.

I left about four inches of water in the tank simply because the pump did not suck it all out. There also had been a rain so there was about six inches of water in the deepest end. I looked down and saw a great number of fry swimming around in the water. Even at that early age, I could tell some were yellow and would probably grow up to be yamabuki ogans since I remember seeing a very nice but small fish swimming with the others. It usually takes about three years for koi to breed well and this koi might have been that old, but was no more than eight inches, maybe more since it was a butterfly koi.

When I arrived afternoon, the pond was completely empty and all the fish were gone, either buried under water hyacinth or eaten.

How did all that water get out ... the pond was absolutely empty. I thought I was being smart earlier, in that I did not want to cut a hole in the tank for an overflow. If I let the water come all the way to the top, the fish would swim or jump out. What I did was screw a couple of fittings in the drain hole that was in the absolute bottom of the tank and fasten a standpipe to it. By doing that the water level in the pipe would be the same as in the tank and I could cut off the PVC at the level that I wanted.

I should have fastened the standpipe to a stake driven in the ground. The stand pipe was laying flat on the ground and the best I can conclude that a raccoon was messing around with the pond and pushed the stand pipe all the way to the ground.

We learn our lessons the hard way.

jack

 

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