1000 mile fish move.

[moo.]

Yes you read right. I had to move 1042 miles away, or 1678 Km for the metric users like me. Now that would be hard enough if I only posessed furniture, clothing, household items etc but no, I have fish, and they needed to come with me. Talk about STRESS!

Background story: I live in Queensland, Australia and I have been wanting to move down to Melbourne for quite a while now to be with my partner, but Ive never had the funds, the time, or the motivation to make the HUGE effort to pack up my life and head down south.
Earlier this year though, as you may have heard, Queensland went through some horrible flooding, where over 75% of the state was affected. I was part of that group, the house went under water and I lost almost everything. I did however, manage to save the 4 tank fulls of fish I own before the water came up.
So for the few months after the flooding, my family and I have been living with friends and in a rental home and my fish have been living in my workplaces aquarium system, while we wait for our house to be repaired.

The bright side to that situation was that because of the floods, I HAD to pack up and move, so I came to the decision that rather than move back into the house I would now move interstate. Thats when the stress and uncertainty started..
How do I move fish that far?
All my tanks are up here, where will the fish go once we get to melbourne?
Will they even survive the trip??

To be continued...

 

[mqktandy]

Pm bigrich. He move a bunnch of 2+ foot catfish way further than 1000miles. I think his thread on it is in the catfish section actually. Named something of catfish in Washington and my trip to save them

 

[pshtex]

GL on the move i would just say to keep them in dark containers and get there as fast as possible

 

[lsgraulau]

I would say pre-cycle the other fish tank and get friends to help with the move, the less fish per car (if you're driving) possible and keep them in the fewest number per container.

 

[muffywrx]

wow! Good luck on the move!

 

[moo.]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I have already made this trip though, and I'm just posting it as a story really so other people can learn from my experiences.

This really was a stressful experience and it was made worse by the time frame in which me and my partner did it. We knew we were going to move my stuff and fish down to our new house, we just didnt know when. One day in june we found out we had no work for the next couple days, so we left the next morning! haha!

It takes 2 days to drive from our place in melbourne to my parents place, so we had 2 days over the weekend to pack up everything and leave early monday morning.

It wasnt all spare of the moment though. Before we left I had bought a tank, filled it up, and added water conditioner and a heater. All my filters were in Brisbane at my old place and I obviously had no time to cycle a new one so I was going to have to bring back my filters and keep all the media alive as well as the fish.

So over the weekend we packed up all my stuff excluding any fish stuff that was needed last minute, and loaded it onto the trailer. We also did a bit of shopping for things we'd need on the trip. Three styrofoam boxes- to transport the fish, duct tape- to keep them closed and batteries for my battery powered air pumps. I was also worried about temperature loss, we were travelling two days without heat but I didnt want to get all technical and try to plug heaters in or anything like that. We came up with the idea that if the temperature drops significantly we could fill up some baby bottles with boiling water and add them to the boxes. Not a very fancy way of heating but we just needed something simple lol.

On the day of the trip we got up at 5am and started work! Emptying the tanks, catching the fish, cleaning filters, packing the car, setting up air pumps, and cleaning up the mess afterwards took us a couple of hours, and here was the result.

A nicely packed back seat of the car, with the fish filled styrofoam boxes all snugly wrapped with blankets. Not for warmth or anything, just to keep them from rubbing against each other. You DO NOT want to listen to styrofoam squeaking on a long drive!

 

[moo.]

So then weset off! Every bump or hard corner made the water slosh around and caused alittle wave of panic come over me, but deep down I know the fish were ok. Idistracted myself from it by taking in the lovely scenery

 

[moo.]

After 14hours of driving we stopped in Nerrandera, NSW, and decided to stay the night.I checked on the fish before we went to bed, put fresh batteries in the airpumps, just in case, and checked the temperature of the water. It had onlydropped by a degree or so.

I hadplanned to bring the three Styrofoam boxes inside the motel, to make sure therewas no drastic temperature drop during the night, but we didn’t want to riskany damage to the boxes while moving them, so the fishies slept in the car.

Got up earlythe next morning, when it’s still pitch black and first thing I do is jump outof bed and check on the fish. They were all still alive! Woo hoo!

Thetemperature had dropped by about 3 degrees and so my baby bottle plan came intoaction. We just floated a couple bottles in each box while we showered and gotready, and then removed them before we hit the road again. Didn’t want thembouncing around and squashing fish while we drove.

 

[moo.]

Six hours later, we were home!

We emptiedsome water from the boxes, brought them inside, along with the filters neededfor the new tank.

I beganacclimating my fish to the new water as I was setting up the filters and afteran hour or so it was time for them to finally go into the tank.

 

[moo.]

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my journey lol. It’s been 4.5 months since the trip nowand I still haven’t lost a single fish I brought down, so I shall consider thata success!