I've Lost All My Fish

This past weekend we finally experienced some long overdue sunshine and some wonderfully warm temperatures. We hit the low 40's all weekend. Since it had been so long since we had been able to see into our 275 gallon fish pond to see any of our fish, and the temperature was finally warmer outside, Hubs decided to go try to thaw the ice and see if we had any survivors. He began the process of melting the ice by pouring boiling hot water on the top of the pond, but the water chilled almost instantly and barely melted anything. After a few pots of hot water, he decided to hook up the garden hose to our washing machine and pump hot water straight into the pond.

While he was thawing the pond, I was putting together a little slide show as my tribute to a winter that I will not miss when its over. After an hour of thawing, my sweetie came in and told me he had found a few of our fish, frozen in the ice. We had no idea at this point how thick the ice was, but were praying at least a few of our little guys made it. We had a heater in the pond all winter, but it was obviously completely inadequate. As the hours passed and the inches of ice continued to melt under the hose, we found more and more frozen fish. It was strangely ghostly looking into the ice in our pond with our dead fish frozen in suspended animation. Some looking like if we just thawed the ice around them, they would start swimming again. When all of the ice was melted we discovered that there was about 10" of ice, and our pond was a complete loss. All 20 of our fish slowly went into suspended animation over the past few months and froze to death. It touched me more than I thought it would. I've been so sad about it, I haven't been able to set foot in my backyard since we found them all dead.

We had originally wanted to take all of our fish with us to Texas, and had even made plans on how we would make it work. I know it all sounds silly, but each fish was special to us for different reasons, either because of their coloring, or the length of their fins. We knew each fish and appreciated them individually daily. Below is my tribute to my fish and the horrible winter that will never end.

Fish Roll:

• 5 large goldsifh, approx 3" long, one with really long, flowy fins
• 1 "Whitey" (the only fish with a name)
• 4 fully black boys, approx 1" long, two with really long fins
• 4 fully gold girls, approx 1" long, two with really long fins
• 3 black and gold, approx 1" long
• 3 algea eaters