Here it is finally. Five fourteen hour days and still no end in sight! What a wonderful hobby.
The design goals as most of you know were to try and feature four distinct styles and give recognition to the Four Masters who were the best representations of those styles. I think we have achieved that even though it is only the underlying rock structure and not with the coral in place.
Other design goals were to allow maximum flexibility to maintain water flow through out the tank. This meant that ideally, less rock in the tank than is typical and a somewhat open airy look and feel.
This actually worked in my favour as I discovered quite by accident a fifth 'style' which the team can call its own. As the sculpting progressed one of the Bros Grimm found a rock that looked like a dinosaur head so with a bit of creative touch he finished the head with teeth. He decided it should go at the end (or the head, depending on your perspective) of the canyon style. Then we realized that the sides of the canyon looked like the skeletal lines of the dinosaur body. Jamie added a tail and voilą we have the Jurassic Park style! The Bonsai style stands on its own and will provide many hours of frag heaven for sure.
I will be naming the four masters soon........
There are a number of other 'discoveries' which we made as we were sculpting......
There really is fifty feet of seascape. The temptation to refer to a front and back side of the tank is very difficult to stop doing. Both sides are equally interesting and different from the other. In fact there are distinct areas that unique to each side.
There are a couple of sweet spots that we could not have anticipated because of mirror reflections that became clear with the introduction of the rock.
We really had to keep in mind that the live rock was not the end of the exercise but the beginning. Its very much like a great gardener or landscaper who knows NOT to crowd or overfill the initial landscape with plants that have no room to grow.
Someone in the thread suggested recently that wed shouldn't try and copy individual aquarists tanks and I think I agree with him. We are trying to identify and clone the 'styles'. Thats why I will name the aquarists after the styles have been set. Except ChingChai of course..
that is the first 8 ft ...... next 16 ft to come.
Peter