The first big day of actual MACNA. We headed for the convention centre in time to go to the Apex breakfast and to see the launch of Jim Welsh's alk gizmo. We knew it was coming cos he told us on Tues but it was a surprise to find he had also expanded it to also do Calc and Mg.
We left their in time to get in early with the MASNA members and had a quick look around before heading upstairs and listened to Julian, Austin and Joe.
A huge fish geek fest ensued. We found a few new products, caught up with some friends we'd not yet seen like Lemon and Anthony B.
It was a huge day where we hopefully made some good connections and found a couple of new products we are very interested in getting into Aust.
As we left to return to the hotel the shuttle arrived, its only a 15 min walk but what the hell, we were ready for a shuttle ride lol
Back at the hotel we changed and headed for the Friday night reception. As we were leaving we ran into Larry & Veronica at the bar. They'd just heard Boomer is coming to see us in Oz in Oct and Veronica was soo jealous lol I said hey you come too but she had all the reasons in the world why the business won't keep going without her. We stirred Larry to let her come and left them to it as they weren't going to the reception.
It was a hoot, we gathered back at the convention centre and were led out by Kevin holding a MACNA banner accompanied by a jazz band and a fish, mermaid and seahorse. There were some chicks twirling parasols too we all trailed along behind and it was so much fun. We arrived at Mardi Gras World where we wandered through the float storage area before coming to a bar handing out free hurricanes, quite applicable if only due to Harvey still building up on the coast.
A short walk and we were in the only southern plantation style home and then the beautiful gardens which had bars and food stations set up all around it. We found the temp outside to be inexplicably not too bad until we realised the "sky" was actually a roof that looked like the sky!
We queued up with hundreds of others for the main beef meal, there were also gumbo and shrimp & grits stations but we stuck with the beef which was pretty good.
We chatted to a variety of peeps including Kathy Leahy, Matt Wittenrich who has just bred conspics, John Cops and finally caught up with Elena and Sanjay. We introduced Ben Thompson to a lot of people incl John who whipped out his phone and said, I have your photo! He'd been sent a pic of a fish at some point and recognised Bens big smile as the guy who'd caught a fish that had been offered to John.
When it wound up at 10 we were invited to the Coral Vue party which turned out to be a 20 min walk or 5+ min uber which seemed too hard and to a private home with Sanjay and Joe but we opted to get the last shuttle back to the hotel.
The party continued there, we had a great night with John Cops, Ben, Jim Welsh who'd clearly been celebrating big time the release of his Alk gizmo; Angie, who was eventually joined by Kevin, Walt and Deb Smith and many more. Boomer rushed to let us know Larry told Veronica she should go with him to visit us so she's super excited.
Before we knew it 2am rocked around and I headed for bed, Pete was only a half hour or so behind, way earlier than is usual for us at MACNA