With the Fall season in full swing, that means just one thing — its almost time for Reef-A-Palooza in Orange County. Happening on Saturday and Sunday, October 22 and 23, RAP is the largest marine aquarium event in the world with attendees last year exceeding 3000 reef heads. With seven years of producing the Reefapalooza event, the Southern California Marine Aquarium Society has been putting together a quality show and we expect no different this year.
Not only do we expect to see some great corals and awesome products, but we well be having our traveling Reef Builders lounge where we will be on hand to chat about the great stuff we see in the hobby. Jake and Yikai will both be on hand to talk reef shop, whether it be about LEDs, rare fish, unique corals or reef aquarium building in general. On top of this, our own Jake Adams will be speaking about an exciting new topic related to Ecoreef Zero with equal parts coral aquarium futurism and reef aquarium heresy – ought to be a good one. There’s a fully loaded lineup of speakers this year and we’ll definitely be dropping by Katie Barott’s bacteria and corals talk, Bob Fenner’s Fiji Collection Station presentation sounds enticing and Ret Talbot’s sustainability talk is starting to become required listening for anyone in the industry of marine ornamental fish and corals.
We expect to see the new Mazarra LED in the CoralVue booth, Ecoxotic will have more information on their second generation Panorama fixture, maybe even with some longer Panorama Pro LED strips on hand, CPR has their production nano media reactors ready and who know what else other vendors will bring up. In addition to seeing some new products and lots of great corals and frags, the Reefapalooza raffle is second to none – it’ll be a great opportunity to play the odds of winning some really nice gear, cause we all now that SoCal reefers are die-hard gear-heads when it comes to skimmers, lights and pumps. We’ll be sure to keep it covered and smothered here on RB but if you’re within a few zip codes of the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa Californa, you better be there.
