Discus Ireland - Tony Vaughan
| Tony Vaughan |
 Tony Vaughan (aka - Larry the Leprechaun)Hi, I am Tony and live in Limerick in the Mid West of Ireland. "Home of the Spirit of Rugby". I am almost 30 and live with my wife Margaret and son Jake. I have been keeping tropical fish since I was 13. My gran died and left a big bag of coppers so my brother and I went down to our local pet shop and bought a second hand tank and some tropical fish. We learned fast and I am now sorry that I didn't read a book first. It would have saved us time money and effort, and most of all fishes lives.When I look back now I am amazed any of them survived. I heard somewhere that the most important thing was to keep a tank clean. We only had a small box filter to start off with so to keep everything clean we used to do 100% a week water changes. We used to break down the tank and boil the gravel every week. Cringe Cringe. Talk about New tank syndrome EVERY WEEK !!! I still blame the lack of knowledge in the LFS' here. They didn't care as we came back for new fish almost weekly. I started to keep Discus while living in England. I used to cycle to Maidenhead aquatics in Iver every Friday and spend hours there looking around. I'm sure they thought I was mad. Some say I still am. In my opinion there is no such thing as a person who just keeps Discus. I think that Discus Keeping becomes an obsession and there are no two ways about it. I learned more about chemistry in 1 year of Discus keeping than I did in 4 years of chemistry at school. If there were more teachers who made it interesting to learn rather than force learning then people would be more educated. Common Sense isn't very common is it ? We used to live in a 1 bedroom apartment and I had 1 200l tank, then I got two more smaller one's. Now we have bought a 3 bedroom house and the box-room is now the fish room. I have 5 tanks in that small little room (guests sleep on the couch). I am planning to build a shed in my back yard for my fish. I want to set up a business due to the lack of quality fish in this country. Almost all of my fish have been imported. I started Discus Ireland to help other Discus keepers and to date is very small but we are a very close group. I don't think there are that many discus keepers in Ireland. I went to Duisberg last year with my good mate Sid from Scottish Discus. I had a great time meeting all the people who I had met on the net and the big names, Jack Wattley, Bernd Degen, Walter Soestbergen, Shaifullah Yeng, Dieter Untergasser and Andrew Soh to name a few. Another great thing about Germany is that stuff is so cheap. I brought back cardinal tetra's, I paid 40 cent each. If I buy them here (when I can get them) I can pay up to 3 Euro ea. If there is anything I can do for anyone on the forum, please do not hesitate to let me know. All the Best - Tony Vaughan @ Discus Ireland by Tony Vaughan
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