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Greater Seattle Aquarium Society

GSAS Board meeting: 27 April 1999

text and photos by Erik Olson

The end of the season is rapidly approaching for GSAS, which means that we’ll be looking for new folks to join the board for next fall! In case you didn’t know, the board meetings are always open to any and all members, so whether you’re interested in helping with an upcoming activity, speaking your mind about something, or you just want to see other peoples fish tanks, consider dropping by. The board meetings are almost always held two weeks before the regular meeting, and you can find out the location in the newsletter (in the fine print below the main monthly meeting).

Last month’s meeting was held at the home of Bob Frangooles and Anne pace. As typical of these meetings, most of the first hour was everyone milling around looking at fish. Bob and Anne moved there about a year and a half ago and have been undergoing the trials and tribulations of setting up a nice fishroom in their basement, and it’s been very fun to see it progress. Taking up one entire wall, they’ve got a wooden rack of some 15+ tanks ranging from 5 to 20 gallons and housing various soft and hard-water dwarf cichlids.

On the opposite wall sits a stunning 300 gallon tank housing a colony of Cyphotilapia frontosa. (including fry!).

Like a lot of crazed fish people, Anne and Bob hatch brine shrimp in their laundry closet.

After the tour and some snacks, we settled into the monthly business at hand. President Heather Candelaria got reports from the usual committee heads:

Scott Cartwright, membership director, reported that we got six or seven new memberships at the auction. There may have been more who signed up this month, but it was hard to tell from the annoying Quicken printout that didn’t provide enough information.

Bob, as Promotional Relations guy, produced some nice posters for Wayne Yamashita’s talk. A lot of us are computer geeks (the whole board is on e-mail) and liked that he made the last poster available as a PDF file for us to print, so he’s going to make PDF’s in the future as well. Pop on over to the GSAS web site right now and see it for yourself!

FAAS delegate Heather thinks our membership may have expired by now. There has been no comment on our proposal to let our membership lapse, but she’s going to wait and see if anyone has any interest at the next meeting.

Anne reported that we sold five old books from our library at the auction, which is great because it will make space for the five new books (the entire Back to Nature series on cichlids and catfish) we bought from The Cichlid Exchange. Look for these books in the GSAS library at upcoming meetings.

Dave Sanford has been tending this year’s philanthropy project, a big tank at Liberty High School. He talked about how to keep students from poking at the acrylic.

Bob Dave Scott Steve Cyphotilapia frontosa

Our new board members Laurie Hughes and Don Rudee eagerly volunteered to take over the HAP and BAP programs (from burned-out maintainers Erik and Dave). We decided to make the switch over the summer break, after the semi-yearly awarding of certificates in June. Dave and Erik will both be soliciting folks for spawning reports at the May meeting.

The Fish of the Month for May had to be some kind of Rainbowfish. Your scribe doesn’t know squat about Rainbowfish yet, so can’t tell you more. Perhaps I’ll know more after the meeting. In June, we decided it clearly is going to be a South American Cichlid. We decided on Aequidens pulcher, because they’re a fun fish that’s not difficult to keep or breed.

Likewise, our bowl shows in the next two months will reflect the speakers. In May, Rainbowfish, and in June, South American Cichlids. Debate ensued over whether we should further limit the June show (dwarf only? tankbuster only?), but ended up deciding to leave the category open. The prize in June will be pretty cool; one of those SandMan filters we had at the auction.

Summer is starting to approach, so the members of the board applied generous amounts of peer pressure to Steve Avenell in an attempt to have the picnic at his parents place again. If you were at last year’s picnic, make sure to tell Steve how great it was!

Heather lobbied to have the next board meeting, the last of the season, moved to her home in Queen Anne because she’s moving over the summer and it’ll be the last chance to see the big goldfish and Cryptocoryne planted tank before it gets disturbed for the move.

Last month was the general auction, so a large section of this board meeting was devoted to wrapups of what worked, what didn’t, next year, etc.

Heather’s poll of how newcomers learned of us resulted as follows: 6 from the Times, 8 from the Internet, 1 from local stores, and 8 by word of mouth. The times article cost us about $80, but it seems worth it to everyone...still.

Scott reported we brought in $1800 net. Even the soda table made a profit (which we didn’t expect). We liked the soda, and will have it at future regular meetings (though without the donation bowl). Steve was very impressed by how smoothly everything ran...perhaps the best year ever (which is odd because it was also the least-planned). Scott would have preferred more information from the auctioneers to the recording table. There was a unanimous vote to reimburse Heather for the pizzas given to the setup/teardown folks. We mulled over this as a future perk to draw more general membership help on the meetings. Most importantly, we are in great financial shape for the next year (or three), so the question remains: What sorts of activities should we provide with our new funds?

Around 9:30 the board meeting degenerated into more milling and random discussions, and was so adjourned.