Wonderful weekend spent at the convention

[BallAquatics]

My local club organized a convention this year and it ran over the past weekend.  What a great time.  I even got to meet Jon's plant selling friend Mark Huffman.  Talk about some nice plants, and what a selection!  Brantley & Dawn Berry from Pleco Caves had a large area as well.  I got to catch up with Stephan from Swiss Tropicals.  Stephan had a great display and was doing quite well.  Mike Schadle had a huge selection of books with Pete Cottle's Danios & Devarios displayed front and center.

For speakers we had Ted Judy, Eric Bodrock, Mike Hellweg, and Regina Spotti.  I missed Ted's talks but caught most of the others.  What a wealth of information under one roof.

I picked up a few items.....  a white worm culture, some Sera micron fry food, a goody bag stuffed with items from the convention sponsors - algae wafers, flake foods, hob filter cartridges, instant baby brine shrimp, t-shirts, etc.

I even won some super cool fish in the silent auctions.  First I picked up a dozen eggs of some Lamprichthys tanganicanus.  A simply stunning killifish from lake Tanganyika.  They grow to be quite large and live 5-6 years.



I also won 6 young Nannostomus mortenthaleri.  These guys prefer soft acidic water and are also very nice looking.  I've never kept any Pencil fish.  If these work out I just might have to dabble with some of the others.



My weekend IT work prevented me from attending the auction on Sunday, but I had a great time the other two days!

Dennis

[Mugwump]

  Where was it held? It sounds like it was a real nice event, and you scored some fantastic little fish species. Will this become an annual event now??..
  Mark's a great guy, and as you saw, has a great selection of nice plants....cheap too...we'll see him again in a few weeks. We're getting more anubias. Might try some more water sprite, now that we have some bright LED lighting....I've noticed that the duckweed light that light, so we'll experiment with some more plant varieties again.
   

[BallAquatics]

It was in Columbus Jon, at the Courtyard Columbus West hotel.  Very nice place.  We've started having our swaps and auctions there too.  They supply us this huge room with slide-out room dividers and we can split up the space as needed.  We had a vendor room, speaker room, swap room, and silent auction /staging area all going at once.  The hotel caters the banquet and lunches as needed.  Makes for a very nice event.  Out-of-towners can get rooms at a discount and the hotel permits room sales of fish and other aquatic goodies.

http://www.columbusfishclub.org/CAFE_Convention.php

I'm not sure we can afford to have it every year.  It's very costly and lots of work for an all volunteer organization.  This was our second convention, we had the first back in 2010, and it was so much fun we've been saving for this one ever since.

Dennis

[Mugwump]

Boomba, a wonderful event it must have been....let us know when you'll be having another, we might attend and join the fun...heck, we can get Capt'n Bob & Gail, Scott, etal to come with too...a grand old time for all.. .....