Rebooting

Well, I made the commitment last night to totally break the tank down and start from scratch. Ryan had been advocating this for a while, but I persisted in thinking that I could deal with the endless cycle of algae (mostly bryopsis) irradication and resulting nutrient spikes and restart of the cycle. Of course, this is hard on the (remaining) livestock... Crustaceans seem to persist well: orange claw and blue leg hermits, peppermint shrimp, miscellaneous *pods.

"Cooking" the live rock might have been an option, but at a cost of about 2 months of downtime. There is a really good thread on cooking here: http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=650985

I feel pretty bad that my wife is sitting at home looking at this wasteland, and 2 months seems to add insult to injury so the rock is going to Keen Reef to be cooked by someone else, and I'm ordering some dry rock with which to start over with.

Anyway, I thought it might be good to start with some photos of the system in its heyday (late 2008.) RIP "Skit" (the fairy basslet.)