I just wanted to post to thank everyone who helped give me links, tips, and other great information on successfully transporting large fish. I am happy to report that the transport was a total success. Not a single loss in transit, and two weeks later, everyone is still doing fine.
At the start of this month, I flew back to NY to retrieve my 14 largest fish, including a 14" common goldfish and a 10" wolf fish. I decided, after a lot of reading, to go the route of packaging them as if for shipping. I bought some massive koi shipping bags (seriously, there was close to 5g of water in each of them, and that was filled only about a third of the way with water, the rest air), an oxygen tank and hook-up, cool packs, and insulation materials. I had my parents fast everyone for five days, and the goldfish were conveniently already "chilled" since it had gotten down to about 40 deg in the outdoor pond and 50 in the basement tanks. The morning of was very hectic because we had to drain out so many large tanks to get to the fish in wonderful, pouring-rain, near-freezing temps (not to mention some issues with oxygenating the bags), and a 17 hour straight run drive is not exactly fun.
But - fully worth it!
So thanks again MFK for helping me sort this out.
At the start of this month, I flew back to NY to retrieve my 14 largest fish, including a 14" common goldfish and a 10" wolf fish. I decided, after a lot of reading, to go the route of packaging them as if for shipping. I bought some massive koi shipping bags (seriously, there was close to 5g of water in each of them, and that was filled only about a third of the way with water, the rest air), an oxygen tank and hook-up, cool packs, and insulation materials. I had my parents fast everyone for five days, and the goldfish were conveniently already "chilled" since it had gotten down to about 40 deg in the outdoor pond and 50 in the basement tanks. The morning of was very hectic because we had to drain out so many large tanks to get to the fish in wonderful, pouring-rain, near-freezing temps (not to mention some issues with oxygenating the bags), and a 17 hour straight run drive is not exactly fun.
But - fully worth it!
So thanks again MFK for helping me sort this out.
