The Day I Went Swimming With Big Friendly Fish?!

yep that's right this is me swimming in a pond full of huge colorful fish but to explain how on earth i ended up in there and the journey these fish have been on to get that big we're gonna have to go back to the start of this day this is cuddle rook koi farm in the uk and today we were going to be meeting up with the guys who worked there for a tour around the site where we'd be able to get a glimpse of the day-to-day work that goes on at the farm they had also told us of a secret indoor pond that was large enough to swim in this was what we were most excited to see upon arriving we met up with sam i'm now the general manager of cultural click on uh background to me as i first got interested in fish going snorkeling as a kid in fiji my head went underwater my mind was just blown by all these colours and all these fish and i was instantly hooked so i started keeping fishing aquariums um it grew from a little goldfish bowl to a bigger tank to keeping marine fish things like that and i just absolutely loved it couldn't get enough of it sam's fascination with fish led him to end up working at the koi farm and along with the owner mark they breed and supply koi to thousands of fish keepers across the country that morning the guys got straight to work netting one of their ponds used to grow fish throughout the summer [Music] thousands of fish were hatched from eggs and placed in these ponds during the spring and we were about to find out how much they'd grown and how their colors were developing we're now walking down by one of the ponds the guys have jumped in with a net and we're gonna see what we can catch so we spawn them indoors and then three days old they are stocked out into mud ponds we stock usually about 40 to 50 000 per pond so bear in mind we've got 13 ponds that's a lot of fish to go through the hats aren't just the looks it's for the spiders spiders yeah and also there's all like spiders oh bugs nests and stuff under here so i was gonna say what the what's the hat for his sun's not exactly out is it so you're kind of scaring them out of the edge as well down here making the fish go more into the middle you've got it and then we're shaking the letters we do it to keep them away from the edge of it so we're not hurting them basically we're not sort of dragging them in [Music] it was exciting watching the nets being brought in and as they drew it closer we began to see hundreds of small colorful fish [Music] well they managed to get a few just just one or two fish in that now i'd say probably [Music] these fish were soon to be transported into heated indoor rooms to continue growing throughout the winter there were literally thousands of them but it was interesting how much each fish varied in colour and size the size variation can be quite considerable so these two are the same age on the same spawning but as you can see there's massive variation in the the growth rate it's so satisfying to watch you scooping the fish so you're scooping like breakfast cereal or something carl are you enjoying your day am i what have i seen 10 000 fish yes am i happy yes are we gonna see even more in a minute yes is alex gonna go under with massive koi um degrees if you're brave enough what what i'm gonna eat you what pond is it where is the pond secret pond oh i haven't seen it fish house monsters living there the fish were now being transported into temporary well-oxygenated tanks where they would only stay for a short while this is where the grading process begins [Music] grading is basically quality control where someone with a trained eye has to pick out the few which are likely to grow into prized specimen fish the majority are sold a lot cheaper [Music] we found out that grading is a very tricky process as the colors of koi change and develop over time mark spends days at a time sat at this chair looking through all his fish sometimes only finding one or two that satisfy him this sure would test your patience i don't want to keep too many so we've got so many to go through yeah so i'm looking mostly for the entire shine about the fish while mark got on with the grading sam took us into another one of their fish rooms so these are most of our brood fish which we have on the farm so these are anything from three to probably up to 15 years old i've just been taken into the poly tunnel where they keep all their brood fish now these are the mums and dads of all those small fish that we saw earlier on today and there's some huge incredible looking fish in this these circle ponds up to 80 centimeters [Music] no oh give found the only hole in the net clever fish these fish are too clever so this is the mum of the first pond you saw harvesting this morning i actually was with mark in japan two years ago and selected this fish as a small 30 centimetre fish in japan along with the siblings that are in here this is a fish i've seen this whole sort of journey from japan to here to breeding from and this is a really special fish really deep coloured pattern as you can see like every scale stands out like a honeycomb a couple of hours later and mark was still busy looking through his harvest from the morning there we go there we go yeah hey he's found a good one he's taken all of that and we found one good one you like him i like him a lot what we're witnessing here is a fish roundabout there's a big shoulder them in the middle of the tank and then there's a load which is just swimming around the outside of them it's crazy which way do they give give way to they are going oh they're just like english no and they're going clockwise yeah um giving way to the right yeah which side of the road are they on um they're just everywhere scattered across a whole row a fish roundabout i like it and that was the fish roundabout something else we noticed whilst at the farm was that they had an interesting species of fish that kept the algae under control these were plecos a type of catfish that originate from central and south american rivers they are often kept by tropical fish keepers but here they were being put to good use eating the algae anyway back to the koi over the next few years these fish will continue to grow some are sold smaller and others are grown on to rather large sizes and we were about to witness some of the farm's finest koi [Music] um is this a room with secrets in it this is the secret fish house and you have fish in here right okay just just checking very special fish oh no i can't do it oh [Music] you can't see because i got my mask on but my mouth is wide open this is the coolest koi pond i've seen outside of japan 100 wow we could put the gopro in here it's clear enough not only did mark let us take a look at some of his best looking fish he also granted me permission to swim with them now this was an opportunity i never thought i'd get [Music] let's go swimming [Music] i hate cold water i need to debug my mask [Applause] [Music] these fish were so tame i would go down look around and they'd be swimming all around me they weren't like spooking out the way i've never seen fish which they are so friendly [Music] that's probably the coolest swimming experience i've ever had i'm shivering because i'm actually so cold i need to get out quick it's the coolest in more ways than one [Music] [Laughter] this pond is full of very very beautiful fish but for a short time only it had one incredibly ugly specimen in its depths sorry that's right it's all about me just when we thought that they couldn't get more exciting sam had one more room he wanted to show us so before you guys go i want you to take a look in this tank and what fish to you jumps out the most what what attracts you most is this a quiz maybe am i being rated on my answer find out a minute well there's only one or two in there you might have to fight it out you can place the fish out there and we'll give it to you there's a thank you have you got that okayed with the bus yeah yeah and the bosses and the bosses boss really yeah i'm speechless wow no no that's water that's really kind well that's the biggest surprise i've had since my fifth birthday when i got her so i don't know what did i get oh well i can't have that boy maybe i've got game boy no nintendo nintendo that's it sam here is uh a little bit too generous if he if he does this too often the farm isn't going to be financially viable anymore i'm a bit emotional we we came to film a video and these guys have said we can we can have a fish the only difficult thing now is obviously choosing one because there's rather a lot in this particular pond there were so many fish to choose from but one that caught our eye was this little fella a variety of koi called a kujaku or kujaku i don't really have a clue how to say it but this was the variety that we had seen being netted earlier on in the day so it felt fitting to get this one as a memory of our fun day out well cheers ma'am all right that is incredibly kind we've got a new pet fish well that day had a lot more to it than i was expecting a thoroughly learning and excitement filled day we'll let you know how our coy is doing in a future video see you soon

Channel: Carl and Alex

Views: 835,352

Rating: 4.8246841 out of 5

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Id: E0HOq-x7_ug

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020