Australia's Science Forum

May the wind be at your back and the wine especially good!
Lou.

Thanks guys! The wind may be at my back if the sparkling wine we won is a cheap bottle! Maybe that's how we won by so much last Wednesday.

(there is a yacht we race against called "passing wind" - I kid ye not!)

Now you're talking, Richard. We have a trailer sailer and used to race it in Wollongong on lake Illawarra, but now we are so called Holywood sailers. Wine or beer in one hand and main sheet in the other.
Enjoy your race, good luck.
Dont you just love some names?
We used to sail with an undertaker, who called his boat Overtaker.
Lada

Hey Richard, how we got from dead goldfish to sailing??

Aren't we the best lateral thinkers you've ever come across!
Lou.

Good luck trying to enforce this policy...my science teachers are the worse ones at locking doors....only today I had to remove chewing gum from our fish tank and I once lost all of my fish as I stored the salts in the fish tank cupboard and a kid emptied the whole mega jar into the tank....I knew that something was up as soon as I noticed the water was a bright blue but it was too late....every week I have some smartalec adding junk to the tank IT DRIVES ME CRAZY.

That's shocking Lorraine. Why can't they repect and appreciate marine life?

I'm still waiting for all our smashed aquarium equipment to start to be replaced after our little break-in almost 2 months ago. Hopefully it's not too much longer as a lot of the equipment was mine and I wrap up here at the end of the term.

p.s. I have no idea how sailing came up in this thread other than they both require water. It was late in the week and my mind tends to wander a bit with the weekend imminent.

What do you mean "wrap it up"?
Are you leaving and if so, where are you going?
We were sailing on saturday and a lovely harmony 42 sailed by, it was called Gone with the wind.
Lada

A few years ago I had a problem with someone adding acid waste to my yabbies.
I glued a small sign on to the glass saying;

'Cruelty to animals (which includes fish) is punishable by law'

Never had a problem again.

on that note.... I will sail away!

Jumping in on a very old thread here... before or during the holidays someone pressed the emergency shut-off button and turned the power off. I came back to find a dead fish in a very unpleasant fish tank. I have very little knowledge of fish but enough to know they can be sensitive to chemicals. What should I use to clean out the tank and fake logs etc? I have had the pebbles sitting in Miltons for a few days because after rinsing with water they were still stinky.

Rinse and rinse, I think Rosalie. I used to keep goldfish when I was a whole lot younger. The gravel always smelt a bit. If you have an under gravel filter (looks like a plastic rectangle with slots in the plastic) the gravel works as a filtering system. The pump pulls water through the gravel where you should have a good ecosystem of microbes that help break down waste. So you aren't after perfection with it. If the smell is really offensive though, I would consider replacing it with new gravel.
The other option is to spread it out in the sun for a few days. Yep, you may be waiting for summer for consecutive sunny days! But this could be enough to get rid of the smell.
(And I can't believe you managed to find this thread!)

Merilyn1 wrote: ↑28 Jul 2022, 10:33 (And I can't believe you managed to find this thread!)

I searched "cleaning fish tank" figuring someone has probably had to do it in the past!!

Thanks for your suggestion. It was only one fish (named Krud) and he'd been around for a while. They gave him friends at some point but he ate them. He wasn't my responsibility when he was alive but apparently he is now!! So he's sitting in my freezer waiting to go in the skip bin (when I remember one Monday evening for collection on Tuesday...). We are on day 2 of sunshine here. It feels AMAZING!!! Still freezing cold and a bit windy, but still SUNNY!!

Poor Krud. Obviously had some real anger issues, or had just developed a taste for goldfish!

Yeah, we've had sunshine but freezing. Plus, our air con is on the blink. Just in Science. Has been out of action since last week's PD week. Of course the teachers didn't report it when they came back. When I came back on Wednesday and reported it the Property Manager was on leave so nothing happened until this week. Repair guy could only get here today and has said it is going to take some time to work out. I'm still wondering what would have happened if the problem was in Admin...

I don't even know what type of fish he was...