A couple of days after Christmas six brave souls ventured across the state to visit Stephen Kwartler and his champion show guppys.

Stephen lives in West Palm Beach where he retired after serving his time in New York with the phone company. Mike Jacobs set up the adventure and six of us brave souls set out in a rental van for West Palm Beach two days after Santa gave us all new tanks for our soon to be guppys. Accompanying Mike was Michael LoBello, Ryan and Annette Jacobs, Jim Cormier and myself.

When we got there after a three hour drive we were greeted by a fish room that was the envy of us all. Stephen built his house in east Florida with the fish room in mind and his fish room featured over 200 aquariums from five gallons to 20 gallons. I was most fascinated by the water change system, as even in my fish room of 50 aquariums it is a lot of work.

We perused the aquariums and saw some very striking guppies indeed. The Gulf Coast Guppy Group (GCGG) as we called ourselves picked out numerous beautiful guppies to add to our collections.

While having Stephen explain his water change system to us, it kicked in. Every four hours the system which consists of swimming pool pumps and four large holding vats for the water fills every aquarium and through the use of overflow pipes in each aquarium changes a percentage of the water.

While the water is filling the tubs back up again from his underground well, the water is constantly circulated through an Ultraviolet light, a fluidized sand filter then to a wet and dry and then finally back into the tubs again. Stephen never has to (well almost never) do any manual water changes at all. Again it was the envy of us all.

So when the bowl show again features guppies, we will be seeing some very fine specimens indeed. One of the many joys of keeping fish.