- It's BRS 360 Thursday, and today it's time to share
my personal reefing journey.
Many parts I've never told on YouTube before,
hopefully you can catch a hint
of where the passion comes from
and why I'm so excited about this specific series.
All that's comin' up.
(upbeat music)
hey I'm Ryan this is the BRS 360 journey
of taking everything that we've learned about reefing,
taking that full circle and transforming those experiences
into a 360 gallon reef tank.
This week is all about back story context
for what you're going to see in this series.
Within that story you're gonna learn one fundamental thing
that helped me transition from mildly successful
to a real reef tank,
that ultimately laid down the foundation
for everything to come.
Whether or not they realize it at the time or not,
I think this is one of those paths
that most successfully reefers out there have followed.
I'm kickin' this series off this way
because I think it's valuable to have a deeper insight
into why I've been doing this so long,
how this experience shape an install like this,
and the year long journey we're gonna have
setting the tank up together
and hopefully many years of watching it flourish
as well as exploring the challenges along the way.
I think most of you either know me as the BRS TV YouTube guy
or one of the owners of Bulk Reef Supply.
But what made those two things happen
is I'm just a guy who started a tank
awhile back and enjoys the hobby.
I suspect like many of you dive in head first
into whatever I'm interested in,
enjoy learning new things, and even more,
sharing those lessons with others.
The bigger the challenge the more interesting it is.
Reefing allows me to fulfill all of those desires
of this seemingly endless journey of knowledge acquisition,
successes, failures and the opportunity
to share them both with others.
A perfect hobby for me, and why I've been doing it so long.
My reef tanks have even flowed over
into a professional journey.
The personal and professional journeys are different paths.
This week's all about that personal journey.
Next week, we get to see the entire picture
of where BRS and even BRS TV came from and that evolution,
will intertwine their separate unique adventures that have
shaped my reefing path differently.
So starting with my first tank, that's surprisingly
a bulk of this will be related to the experience of my
first tank that first takes shape the hobby for me
and I bet many of you as well.
Most of us will either fail in that first year
or make it past twelve months, get a taste of the dream,
and reefing will be in our DNA for life.
I believe there are three types of reefers,
who make it past twelve months.
Those who had a solid source of information from the
beginning and the wisdom to listen
to those who came before them.
Those that didn't, but have a mentality of success
at all costs through strong intuition and sheer willpower.
And of course the lucky who are like me,
a combination of all that coming when I needed it most.
That first tank went up in 2004, I had zero knowledge
on reef tanks, or what's involved at the time.
We were just in a fish store one day and
I decided I wanted one, how hard can it be?
Decided that 2,000 dollars was a fair budget
for the project, and saved up over
the next few months to make it happen.
In that time I did enough research to decide I wanted
a 90 gallon tank, because bigger tanks were easier in many
ways, but one day I walked into a fish store with two grand
in hand and said tell me what
I need to set up a salt water tank.
I gotta tell you, at the time, it was a huge let down,
because no one there really wanted
to spend the time walking me through this.
I left and went to another store
a block away and had the same experience.
I was kinda blown away that no one wanted my
two grand, and went home with nothing.
I've been telling that story for fifteen years
with overwhelming disappointment
in that experience, I mean they sell fish
and equipment, shouldn't they be able
to tell me what I need?
Well I had an epiphany this week,
while working on this episode,
the problem was me, not the store.
We both could have done better, but I will own my
expectations were totally out of line with reality.
Imagine I walked into a Williams-Sonoma and said
tell me what I need to be chef.
They'd laugh at me because that expectation
is ridiculous, then give me ten minutes
worth of tips, a guidebook,
and then sell me some useful tools.
Like many great challenging hobbies,
reefing is a rabbit hole of knowledge
and while the best people at the store
can be a solid resource, unless you live next to the best
out there, and paradoxically, they have hours
of free time to give guidance, there's going to be
multiple sources of knowledge here.
My only wish is one of those stories had something like a
starter kit that came with everything that I needed,
some brief written instructions to get me rolling.
I've seen that in some of the better stores out there
and it's a ton of help to everyone involved.
I tell that story because that experience is the foundation
of everything that would come later.
Everything personal and professional
traces back to that moment that I walked out of the store
with nothing but the money that I walked in with.
I didn't realize what I had learned that day until
a decade later, but it's not that reefing's actually
all that hard, the missing piece preventing success for many
is obvious sources of easy-to-access
quality reliable information.
The amount of information, it certainly goes way beyond
what a single person can tell you
in ten minutes or even an hour.
So I shrugged off that experience, and descended down
the path or stage that I'll call sheer willpower
that I'm sure many of you could identify with,
particularly those that have been doing this awhile
because knowledge was not as easy to access in the early
2000s and prior, as it is today.
I decided to figure out saltwater tanks on my own
in 2004, YouTube didn't even exist so that wasn't an option.
After reading several books I understood a lot of theory,
but the books were more theory than guidebooks
or instructional and often somewhat dated,
almost like reading the theory of cooking
with only the loosest of recipes.
Difficult to apply my particular desires,
tastes or at least successfully.
This is where reefing forums came in
in 2004, I can say with near certainty
that forum communities like Reef Central
were the number one source of knowledge transfer
and the foundation many reefers
built their knowledge sets off of.
That said, just like my expectation
for the store just handing me all the information
was ridiculous, I think I was using
the forums wrong as well.
Forums provided me an awesome arena
to have fun exploratory discussion with my peers
or facts plausible by a proven theory,
simple opinions, allegorical experiences,
and complete falsehoods all presented
and debated equally for the evolution of the hobby.
That said, I'm just gonna say it like it was,
what makes it awesome for discussion,
debate and evolution makes it a difficult
source of knowledge to decipher as a brand new reefer.
Double so if you don't have unlimited time
to throw at new tank research.
Well there was a treasure trove of information in RC.
The challenge was sifting through all the noise.
Finding the best, high percentage success advice
was like panning for gold where the best advice
isn't just hidden within the sand,
but I hadn't figured out how to spot
the fools gold yet either.
The nature of an open community experience
is you may get a dozen more answers
to the exact same questions.
Almost all of it conflicting personal experiences
pretty far from clear who I should of been listening to.
I enjoyed the experience and the communities
hat full makes this a hobby for me
but if I'm being honest, it was a bit bumpy
road in the beginning as I learned to pan
for gold or find the information gems.
In the end, I just made some decisions
based on all that information and just moved forward,
bought a 90 gallon tank and started stocking it.
You have to forgive me but digital cameras
and phones then are not what they are now,
so I have pretty limited shots of this.
This is about what the tank looked like
for the first year.
At the time I was pretty proud
but obviously far from the best,
particularly in comparison with today's tanks.
At this point I found that sea of
uncoordinated advice from sources that
I didn't vet well and probably didn't
share my own desires or budget
produced an unpredictable patchwork of results
with mostly sheer willpower holding it together.
Sadly almost every piece of equipment
in the tank eventually got replaced.
Some more than once because it either failed,
flooded on my floor,
or wasn't adequate for the job.
Well my budget was two grand,
I bet I spent more than double that
in the first 18 months.
Not because that kind of budget was required
but because of my mistakes and buying
replacement gear over and over.
That didn't touch some of the damage
that poor gear choices did to my floors and home.
However, there was a very significant turning point
or what I'll call stage or path to,
of finding a solid source of information
and the wisdom to listen to those that came before me.
While I wouldn't have described it this way back then,
the turning point is where I stopped listening
to everyone and started listening to someone.
Meaning I stopped data mining this
seemingly endless group of peers
and instead sought out or stumbled onto
mentors for most of my guidance.
Mentor meaning someone who has gifted
me their time, shared some of my values,
in this case budget or at least approached a budget,
and proven themselves to be worthy of me listening to.
I found Randy Holmes Farley on RC
to answer chemistry questions.
His approach matched my goals at the time,
find the cheapest way that works.
Stay away from snake oils and avoid the unnecessary,
and the do it yourself nature
of many of his approaches fit the point
I was at in the hobby.
I particularly liked that back then
it wasn't just random DIY chems.
All the DIY chem options were backed
with research and testing to find the
community well vetted options or resources
that he was confident were safe and would
produce the results for the community.
This approach spoke to me.
I think there's likely tens of thousands
of reefers who can say they wouldn't of had
the success that they've achieved
without Mr. Farley's assistance.
I'm one of them and he's still helping
reefers everyday on Reef2Reef.
Another one was Julian Sprung's book,
Reef Aquarium, Volume Three.
This is where I finally understood
how all the gear and various approaches to using them works.
Not just individually,
but how they all work together
to achieve the desired goal.
Julian knows how to balance known fact
with likely fact based on decades of experience
to help reefers produce desired results.
For me, going to MACNA and IMAC
and listening to the academics and the research,
in particular Andy Kelso's advice
on propagation was what inspired my
desire for propagation later.
But I think more important than anything else,
I upped my forum game.
You may do this differently,
but I did this by shifting from
the global forum of strangers
to my local club's TCMAS forum
where most of the people here knew each other,
have met in meetings,
see each other at fish stores,
there's a whole different level of accountability.
Not just the quality of information shared
but also the respect for each other.
The nature of the local TCMAS club
was most of the people in it had
been doing this for a long time.
Almost everyone openly shares pictures
of their tanks, end results, were likely
to admit mistakes and the smaller more visible pool
was easier to find the people
with the best most helpful advice.
In fact, the personal accountability
within the local group with poor or reckless advice
what I'd call exceedingly rare.
One guy in particular showed me more
than I ever could of hoped.
I'm not sure if he knew it or not,
but David Grigor was my reefing mentor
amongst a slew of other things.
He showed me how to source and automate
do it yourself two part, which 15 years ago
was not as straight forward as it is now.
In fact, if you search for him
you'll find that he was voted
Neptune's Reefer of the Year,
he saving other people's tanks,
sourcing DIY chems, all kinds of things.
In fact, when I needed a dehumidifier
to help with what my frag tanks were doing to my house,
he offered his to me for free.
When I didn't need it any longer,
his only request was for me to find another reefer
who could use it.
If you haven't done it already,
check out the best reefing forum
out there now which is Reef2Reef
and then look in the club section
to see if there's a local club around you.
You might find a bit tighter knit community
within the larger one and a balance
of information between the two.
Potentially one for direct advice,
and one for further exploration,
at least that's what I've found.
There are many others out there
that helped me as well and I hope
they forgive me for not mentioning every last one of them,
but I was better set up for success now
not listening to everyone but listening to people
who matched my desires, budget, and mentality
but also proved themselves to be quality
sources of information and us having
a totally different level of success now.
Now adding clams to the tank SPS Coral Frags
and there's one thing for certain,
the quality of information I was receiving
had a direct causation to my success.
Effort put into refining who I listened to
resulted in better quality information,
and ultimately this what my very first tank
looked like a year later.
Actually it really came into itself after that,
but see I don't have any videos past this one.
I mentioned earlier that I'm gonna share
the one fundamental thing that helped me
find success and that's it.
I stopped listening to everyone
and started listening to someone.
Actually a mix of people that I felt
had a track record of successful advice
willing to show me their failures
as quickly as successes,
and accessible and they took time
to answer my direct questions specific to my tank.
The best source for that I found was club formed,
but you may find it elsewhere.
I'm actually gonna share some of my current mentors
in a moment but before that i'd like to share
why I'm only talking about my first tank today.
Outside of that first tank being
the foundation and most critical step of my journey,
I don't have to share most of my other tanks
because you've already watched many of them.
For those of you that are watching the longest,
maybe you remember Reed and I's first
how to set up a salt water tank series
where we followed the set up and progress
of a tank that got upgraded over the years
from my basement to bedroom to office.
Many of you also followed
the multi-year Clown Harem build.
The BRS160 52 weeks of reefing series.
We fought that set up for a year
and the updates years later.
The WWC BRS hybrid method and even some
experiment tanks with the ULM's here in my office.
In fact I've been releasing videos
since June 2008, 11 years ago.
So many of you actually got to experience
a solid portion of my personal reefing journey
documented almost from the beginning.
So that's what the current BRS360 is all about.
The next evolution this time skipping a lot
of the debate and just sharing what I've learned
over the years and how it applies to my build
in my own home, just a natural evolution
in my own personal reefing journey
that I can just share with my family
and all of you in the BRS community.
I mentioned to you I wanted to share
some of my mentors with you,
at this point I'm shifting from
the collection of knowledge to the perfection
of application of knowledge.
My mentors I look to now are all those
who produced the results I'm aspiring to achieve myself.
Some I've already had the fortune
of sharing with you in fact the WWC team,
Victor, Lou, and Josh in particular,
spent a ton of time telling me
everything they do to produce this success
when coral growth and coloration's
not just a hobby but a business.
Just elevating my game and letting me share it with you.
A friend of mine shared a comment with me one day
that really stuck, the most successful people
in the world often hoard the knowledge
they think makes them unique.
While not always the case,
I respect the people that proved that
to me not true the most.
This is why when the World Wide Coral team
spent many thousands of dollars flying
back and forth here in to share their knowledge
set was so impressive to me.
A literal open book to anything I could ask
so I could get the best information to all of you,
rather than horde knowledge.
Their goal is your successful reef tank
and I feel confident in saying the replicable results
have proven themselves to be worth listening to,
at least if this kind of tank is the goal.
That leads into the best part of the BRS360 series.
Right after each episode
we're gonna be talking reefing live.
I'm gonna do my best to bring in
some of my mentors so that we can
chat live and answer your questions.
Last week we talked to Jeremy from Brightwell
but this week we're gonna get Randy's backstory.
I don't know if he knows it,
but he's absolutely one of my mentors.
Not because he has more years of reefing under him,
but because he's intelligent
and knows how to connect the dots.
In this case steel sharpens steel
and in almost everything you see here
is better because Randy's part of it.
Really I could say that about the entire video team,
Dave, Carlos, Aaron, and Josh.
but in just a couple hours
we're gonna go live with talking
reef tank journeys, I'll answer any of your questions,
as well as dive into Randy's reefing journey
which is very different than mine.
So click this link to join us,
or see how it all went down.