This January meeting was at the Fish Garden in Newnan GA about 30 miles south of Atlanta. Owned by Erik McCraw and staffed by Stan and Ross, the store is in a residential high ceiling building with tanks on just about every wall. The entire store is salt-water with one lizard [in a very nice sandbed] with live rock cultures, a deck out back and propagation greenhouses. He has been a hobbyist for 20 years and native to Newnan, has a microbiology degree and a 2 year old daughter. He prefers to answer from experience and trys to maintain a collection of unique animals. As a host we had chicken nuggets, cookies and soft drinks. He joined the club as a corporate sponsor which means we should suppport him and he agreed to 10% discount for anyone with a club I.D.
At 7:30pm Bob Lemke introduced Charles Kuehne [V.P.] who presided over the meeting in the absence of Andy Diass [President but not present due to illness]. We briefly heard from the Board of Director's meeting [notes on Website] and welcomed the lack of business discussion experienced in late last year 2002. The minutes of Nov & Dec were accepted as were the Consitution and By-Laws. The money from the tickets sold to Eric Bournman's lecture will pay for the legal process in becoming a non-profit organization. This was the first meeting at which dues were collected and a few more than a dozen were prepared with their contact information sheet and cash to get us started. Charles spent time listing the benefits of joining even though we have no financial restrictions on attendence. Membership is required to participate on a decision making level or to become an officer. Any presentation or guest lecture will be discounted to members or may be restricted in number of seats with club members being invited first. Our web site may have some information restricted to members only in the future and a lending library has been established with Curtis Wright as librarian. At this meeting Kent provided samples of a new rotifer based food "Zooplex" and in the future door prizes may be another member only perk.
The Show&Tell for the evening was Charles explaining the ways of Reverse Osmosis and DeIonizing Resins. Some of us has seen pictures of his tank support design and his professional plumbing and wiring. I feel his advice will be carefully considered. We can all hope he will write an article for posting to the website with lots of diagrams. Next up will likely be a presentation on algae by
Tom Wyatt with maybe some tips on controlling its intrusion into our reef tanks. Maria Barrow has asked anyone with information to share to contact her in setting up an approriate schedule.
We learned the club has moved to a new message board
www.TheReefTank.com and I actually heard claps and cheers. A lot of positive feedback has come from the change even though the site itself is coincidently growing and changing to larger capacity hardware which means the first evening before the meeting the server was inaccessible. LOL or lots of laughs at that irony.
At 8:00pm we went around the room and introduced ourselves and found we had 2 new members, Donna and Mike Drake from Newnan and a couple more that we do not see often, Heather Hasty who is starting a new 30 gallon, and Vikki and Don Pelino [cyberchef] from Columbus. Everyone from Canton seemed to have made the long trip as well. Maria brought her dad who watches her tanks during the day and Jorge Cabrera was wishing his side of town had such a store for salt water livestock. We actually spent the next two hours touring the tanks and making a few purchases, getting to know one another a little better and very glad we made the trip.
At 100:00pm we adjourned and journeyed home.
William Fisher, ARC secretary.
