Boy was that some time ago.  A guy I was working with, whose name is Tim  was (and still is as far as I know) really into the hobby.  We were talking about it off and on and I was getting more and more interested in it.

For those of you who read my previous article on how I got into keeping fish in the first place, you know that I had already come into knowing what I was doing the hard way for keeping a tropical freshwater tank.

Now this other guy at work named Scott had a 75 gallon tank from when he had a marine tank and it was sitting there doing nothing.  Having gone through (or was going through, I forget) a divorce, he sold it to me cheap.  I got it, the stand, and accessories for under $100 dollars.  It was the deal of a lifetime and I snatched it up.

I still made mistakes, I still didn’t know a whole lot.  It took forever before I got a protein skimmer. Over time I had a bare bottom tank, then a sand bottomed tank and finally a plenum.  At one point I had a bright blue anemone that was large enough to fill a 10 gallon aquarium all by it’s little lonesome.

Tim told me about a magazine and so I started buying it and reading up on it.  At this point my interest was virtually unstoppable.  I read almost every article in that magazine every time I bought it, I even had a subscription to it at one point.

Over a few years I probably invested $1000 – $2000 dollars into that tank.  $30 here or $40 there before I finally had to give up the hobby.  After I lost my tank (I’ll save that for another post)  I kept a 10 gallon tank (which did very very well) and a small 2 gallon tank that came with a biowheel.

Now I can’t have one at all, sigh.  Anybody interested in posting some pictures of their tanks here?  Seriously, let me know.

Maybe next time I’ll tell you how I lost my 75 gallon tank.  I still cringe.

– Jeffery