Today was to be our last day of visiting breeders. We had two more stops to make, one being Ueno Koi Farm, the other Okawa.
We took the train from Okayama to Kureme. Kureme is based on the island known as Kyushu Island. Kyushu is Japans Southern most main Island, we were a long away from where we started in Niigata!
Visiting Okawa Koi Farm first, Yuji Tanaka of the farm met us at the train station, 30 minutes in the car talking about this years harvests, results and so on. We arrived at the farm.
Here we have a Maruten Sanke, now Rokusai. On our last two trips we hadn't managed to get down to Okawa due to being tight on time. So we hadn't seen this koi in 18 or so months.
Here she is as of April 2015, Yonsai, and 76cm.
In the bowl she went. WOW! She was a lot bigger than we remember . Last year she was 76cm and relatively skinny for her size. Now at 82cm, she has packed on a huge body. Everything about this koi is looking in excellent nick. She has been at 20-24 degrees since we last saw her so with her coming back to the UK soon, we can expect her sumi to really develop nicely.
Here she is now, Rokusai, and now a whopping 82cm. With everything going well, she should make the 90cm mark.
We headed to lunch with the brothers of the farm, of course more koi discussion followed. Yuji Tanaka was telling us about their feeding regime, the temperatures of ponds and so on. He really thinks that the Sanke will flourish in UK water, slightly cooler water, harder water. He expects the sumi to finish really nicely. Down in Kyushu water temperatures rarely dip below 20c. In the summer it can go as high as 30c. Considering this bit of information, the sumi was fairing quite well.
After lunch we took a 10 minute train to the next train station. Hiroki Ueno of Ueno Koi Farm picked us up and drove us to the farm. Here we have 2 koi, one now Sansai, one now Yonsai. Here they are when purchased.
The first was purchased in October 2015 at 54cm and Nisai. The second was purchased in April 2015 at 66cm and Nisai.
Now Sansai and Yonsai respectively the first koi is now 67cm, the second is now a huge 79.5cm! Very nearly breaking the 80cm mark, Hiroki expects it won't take her long.
Very pleased with the results again. Really looking forward to both of these being shipped back to the UK. I can't imagine it will take long for the sumi to really come up.
We're off to the airport the following morning. Nearly time for home.
Thank you all for reading the blog over the last week or so, I hope you've all enjoyed it.
Over the next few days I'll be doing a few blog posts, updates on our azukari koi with development timelines, summarising koi that we have bought, news to look out for on the website and more.
Arigatou Gozaimasu!
