Allow
me to introduce myself, I am Stuart Hopwood, 31 years young,
the only dependents are my Koi. I work for Telkom SA the main
Telecommunications provider for South Africa. When at school
I kept some tropical fish and also enjoyed fishing as a sport.
My previous hobby was collecting phonecards. |
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I
live in Cape Town situated on the tip of South Africa and
is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I am most
fortunate to be able to make this city my home. The complex
I live in consist of 12 units all joined together. October
2000 I joined the SAKKS South African Koi Keepers' Society.
Most of the photos were taken from the second floor by myself, unless other wise
stated. |
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January
2000 I decide to try and make something of my small back garden
(30 square meters in total). I bought a concrete water feature
that held 100 liters and then added 3 koi and a month later
a Biological filter and a UV, this was the beginning of something
much bigger to come. Over the past months I lost 12 little
koi (at that time I did not know the names they were just koi.)
The neighbor's cat helped itself to a few koi and some jumped
out of the water. I believe the water was to shallow. |
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19
October 2000 I gutted my exiting garden that I had spent
the last 9 months working on.
20 October the contractor that was to start building the pond phoned me and said
he was no longer interested in doing the job as he was not going to make enough
money on the job!!
So I did it myself and this is my story.
First I removed 7 tons of sea sand, all going through my lounge and then into
a truck. |
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At
1.6m I hit water because the water table in very high living
only 1 Km from the sea so that put an end to the idea of making
the pond 2-m deep. I wish I had known about the article on Mark's
pond where the solution is given on how to get rid of ground
water.
I
covered the bottom of the pond with black plastic to try and
keep the little bit water that was seeping threw away from
the concrete. I made a grid pattern with 12mm reinforcing steel.
Then placed a 300mm-bottom drain with air stone in about 150mm
of 20Mpa concrete. I did not even think to test to see if the
PVC joints were leak proof before concreting them in.
Here I am leveling the concrete with a helper in the background. (Photo by
Walter)
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I
had to keep the boundary wall up while I was building, this
caused a few sleepless nights.
I was expecting to wake up with a big bang and the boundary wall would be in
the pond. This luckily did not happen.
The
pond is 3,000mm x 1,700mm externally, and the walls are 220mm
thick. The pond holds 4,500 litres and took 3 months to construct. |
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