sigh............. unfortunatly, i have a bad news update.......
apparently, the person I had watching my tank over christmas break did not do the best of jobs (aka, not topping off, overfeeding, ignoring, etc etc).... I got a phone call last night from one of my roommates to tell me that the house smelled bad and the tank looked like death.
I wanted to cry. I fly back tomorrow, so Ill do a full evaluation then, but man, am i completely demoralized....
My roommate was amazing, and he offered to do anything that he could. He said the tank was extremely low on water (about half full), so I told him how to add water over the course of the next 24 hours to bring up the salinity slowly enough to not shock anything that might still be alive. My two clownfish were still alive at the moment, and there was no sign of the goby or eel. The 2.5 gallon tank he said was really really bad, and im guessing most of the smell came from that tank..... he added water slowly to that as well, but my outlook is very dim for that one.
The eel was missing, and at first i told him to look around the outside of the tank to see if it had gone carpet surfing... fortunatly it hadnt, and after my roommate bravely went eel hunting (he was scared, but actually kind of intruiged to find the eel) found the eel ALIVE!
I will be home tomorrow afternoon to do what Im guessing is a must needed waterchange, and an evaluation of the destruction to my tank....... sigh, im so depressed. Hopefully some stuff is still alive coral wise, as there are corals I have had since i started this hobby and would be severly dissapointed if they were dead. I cant begin to explain how thankful I am to have great friends as roommates.... most people would be so overwhelmed with something like this, and he jumped right in to help me out. I am in debt to him for sure.
As for the person who was supposed to take "care" of my tank, i am severly dissapointed. I wish i could chew her out, but alas, its my other roommates girlfriend, so I have to tread carefully on how I handle telling her how she messed up. I guess if anything its my fault, I should have made sure that she was better prepared/educated maybe, or I should have just found someone with saltwater experience to take care of it. (for the record, I had approached my LFS several times to have someone take care of my tank, but they were always too busy or the guy who takes care of tanks was out on a job)
man..... im basically speechless about the whole thing, yet i think that ive written a lot about it. Oh wells, i guess thats the ups and downs of reef keeping..... a never ending learning experiance.