55semireef ,
I was gone for two weeks this summer. During that time period my wife took care of my tanks. She was gone for 2 1/2 days out of the whole two weeks. Guess what happened? The fan went out on our central cooling unit and the temperature in the house rose to over 100.
I was in out of state so my wife got to do her first (and last) water change. She changed out 75g out of my 105g. I lost 5 species of lps and sps, 2 toadstools, tons of ricordia, 2 gorgonians and a flame angel. A black percula, 1 oscellaris, one maroon clown, all my zoos, a galaxia, a cup coral, a small patch of star polyps out of a huge isolated colony and a few ricordias are all that remains. Only one small green monti surived while two large orange montis bleached out immediately.
The summer before, when I was gone for approximately the same amount of time, the power went of and my return pump from my sump didn't kick back on. Neither did some of the pumps that circulated my water in the display tank. End result, 2 dead tangs, 3 clowns, 3 damsals, 1 firefish, 1 foxface, 2 angels, 2 wrasse, 5 cleaner shrimp, one flame shrimp, 1 sargent major. Again, the tank was only left unchecked for 2 consecutive days out of the whole time period. That time my all my corals survived with the exception of a large orange monti. Luckily, I had fragged it and had a small colony in one of my school tanks. I fragged it again and started it all over.
Long story short, I've experienced 2 major crashes in approx. 30 years of keeping tanks and they both happened when I was gone. Bottom line, it does happen.
Buddy Pine, I really feel for you. I know what it's like and it sucks unbelieveably. You face a huge amount of work ahead of you. I almost gave up on the whole mess when it happened the second time to me. I really came close to giving up the hobby. I was utterly depressed for several days as I sat out of state knowing my tank was a disaster. Thank God my wife was beyond patient and did what she could to save what she was able to. She had never used a refractometer or "played" with skimmers before this. Imagine trying to explain how to do this over a cell phone that kept dropping your calls! Dang Cingular! Fewest dropped calls my buttocks!
That was amost two months ago. I finally talked myself into going back to one of my regular lfs and purchased some new corals to "replace" some of the ones that I wasn't able to salvage just yesterday. I'm now glad I stuck with it and saved what I could. It would have been extremelly easy to just take it down and call it quits. Adding a couple of new corals back to the tank raised my enthusiasm quite a bit. In a few weeks I'll be getting frags of some of my corals that I had fragged and given away over the last couple of years. It feels pretty good to know that "part" of them survived and will once again be back in my tanks.
Good Luck and stick with it and let us know how it turns out.-Mike
