This is a story that needs telling, not one that I am proud of, but one you need to hear. I got this Budo-Goromo when a good friend came down to look at Grant and Penny’s pond. It was the first part of January and, as you may remember, it had been very cold for Charleston, with a couple of nights in the low thirties. Well, I figured he was coming from Virginia so it was still colder up there than here, so I didn’t have a warm place for the fish. We all drove to my house to drop off the fish, pick up Linda and then go out for dinner. We got to the house I was  asked what the water temperature of the tank was, - it was 40 degrees. ‘Why?’ I asked, ‘What temperature is the fish in? ’75 degrees’, he replied. I hadn’t thought about his greenhouses! Well, with no other choice, we put the bag in the tank and went to dinner.

The first decision was made, we would accept my company’s offer to relocate to South Carolina in the USA from Stafford in England. But then came the really big decision. What are we going to do with the fish? The rational thing to do would be to sell them or give them away. But the terms "rational" and "Koi keeping" seem to be misnomers and after all these were our friends. So the commitment was made that we would move to the US and take our Koi with us. Once the commitment was made we then had to plan the details. The plan was that we would transfer the fish from our pond to a friend who lived nearby, build a pond when we got to the US, and then have the fish flown over. We guessed that this would take about 6 months.