Waited until after the storm to post this...
Saturday morning things looked BAD, so we tore everything down to take it to my buddies house. He was out of the path of hurricane force winds and had 72 hours of battery back-up plus at least two weeks worth of fuel for his generator. We never lost power at the house, but that just goes to show how unpredictable these things can be 'eh?
These are "before" shots - two halves of the tank
This is what the tank looked like after we removed most coral and fish. one full-size blue cooler and one five-gallon bucket full of rock, colonies, and fish plus a five-gallon bucket full of bagged frags and colonies:
Brings new definition to "heavily stocked top-down reef"
First stop: Friend's established 90G. This tank was already well stocked, so our most valuable colonies and frags went into this tank and our two big tangs went in the sump. Most of the SPS you see is ours:
That tank was only able to hold a fraction of what we had, so we contacted a third friend who lived near them and had a generator. He had a newly cycled 60G and agreed to take what was left. This tank was empty of livestock when we arrived with an "instant reef." Many LPS colonies, SPS frags, a few nice mushrooms, ricordea florida, ricordea yuma, and my big zoa colonies, as well as orchid dottyback and two pairs of clowns, one caramel one onyx:
It was heartbreaking tearing down our tank - I had worked for years to get it to a point where I was really happy with out results. It hurts even more to know that it ended up being for nothing. We lost our three big (3-4") fairy wrasses in the move. Only coral loss so far has been two montipora colonies.
We returned home yesterday. The house and livestock we had to leave are all fine, and we brought the two large tangs back with us. We left everything else to avoid stressing it again before it could recover the move. We are discussing using this opportunity to reboot, remove some aggressive palys and rhodactis, and rework the aquascape before slowly rebuilding.
We are hosting the Tampa Bay Reef Club next month and while there won't be much to look at it will be a great opportunity to start a dialogue about hurricane preparedness and the steps we can take to protect our tanks and their inhabitants.
