This week has been a nice steady pace with koi available of all qualitys and varietys and sizes .All im missing was some tosai and any koi that should take my fancy , and today it all fell into place ! The morning started off with my mate Maruhiro who let us buy some very nice grade of tosai , while we sorted out the deal for the tosai my dutch friend Jerone turned up and offered to take Kevin off to the hoshino brothers and take another look at the yonsai kohaku he liked . After the tosai deal had been done , we were ready to shoot off and do the rushing about round Niigata that only westerners seem to excell at ! , Hinori san was having none of it , wife waiting at facility to see you for coffee , in years gone buy i would have refused and shot off like a busy bee , but now more than ever i realise that you have to take time out and spend time with breeders that you want to develop good relationships with . I think this breeder will soon reach the hieghts of some of his better known counter parts , and for some reason we seem to get on very well , to the point where we both seem to laugh at the slightest thing , and this october it seems i am to become staff for a few days in the harvest , somthing i will really look forward to and hope that our buisinesses will grow together . Saying our good byes as tomorrow is our last day we went on to Tsuna , here we found some very nice kin ki utsuri and platinum ogons but wasnt really in the market so we moved on to Torazo . I really needed to pick up the pace with the tosai buisness , so after a long chat Torazo agreed to select a box of tosai around 25cm sanke for us , along with two boxes of go sanke and tancho ( one for me and one for tom ) , and then he offerd a much higher grade of Kohaku 25CM -30CM again which he would select , so i decieded it would be rude to refuse , so sanke and kohaku well taken care off . While looking at some of his nisai i found two kohaku which took my fancy , and there was another one in the better nisai facility which i had seen the other day .While thinking about it Kevin and Jerone returned with the news that they has sealed a very good deal on the yonsai kohaku kevin has been looking at . Caught up in the moment i decieded to celebrateby thinking about buying all three nisai kohaku , worried about the amount of koi ive bought kevin just laughed and said , if you cant sell them , you might as well call it a day Gaz , now i was under pressure so bought them all !!! As we had done so much buisness with Torazo , we diddnt realise it was time for lunch and out appointment with Sakai was rapidly approaching , it was then we realised another problem , a snow blizzard had come down , in an hour and a half while in the breeders 6 inches of snow had fallen , and driving was becoming slightly on the dangerous side as visibilty was very low ! But with our agent being an excellant driver we reached the curry hut ( as its effectionatley known) , and arrived at Sakai koi farm bang on time . After looking around the facility , we started bowling up koi , and i was shcoked at what we were being offered , some very nice koi , right through to high grade koi at very, very nice prices . I can usually only afford one or two koi at this farm as the quality and prices are normaly very high , so i wasnt going to waste an opertunity like this , first of all four nisai gin rin showa , all female 45-50cm and of very high quality , then two female sanke again female and of very high quality , tom bought one and i had the other , along with another nice sanke , gin rin tancho and a tancho showa .Nine Yamamatsu koi and i was very happy , then Sakai showed us another pond with very high quality sanke so another two female sanke were purchased . along with a goromo showa , and two kumonryu . Unfortunately , or fortunatley we were buying so many koi that again time had run away with us , and we diddnt have time to go to the other koi house down the mountains to see the very expensive jumbo tosai i had left out there last year in the mudponds . So we go there tomorrow , and im really looking forward to that as the koi were harvested late after i had returned in October , Sakai has assured me i will be very happy with them , so we will see as we are back there first thing tomorrow . Racing through the snow we just managed to make our appointment at Kaneko , this was very important as we were there to hand pick shiro utsuri tosai , and diddnt want to be late ! When we got there the breeder had already got things ready for us and within minutes we were ready to go .Hand picking tosai is great fun , and the faster you get it done the happier the breeder is, so with a few minutes the job was done , and we also bought a very high quality shiro utsuri , nisai and female . Now to the weather was really closing in and we decieded to beat a hasty retreat to the hotel while we still could , tomorrow will be an intereasting day as the snow is set to fall for the next 24 hours , so im hoping we can still get around ok . A i write this , things have just become worse , either workman are smashing down the wall the other side of my hotel room at 9pm , or there has just been an earthquake , Although i do love my job , i wonder wether somtimes you have to be a bit insane to keep going , oh well back to sleeping in my pants and trainers again ..........................First three kohakus are from Torazo , Maruten sanke we are still thing about purchasing and again is from Torazo , All the rest go sanke are from Yamamatsu koi farm , tosai shiro utsuri hand selected and nisai shiro from Kaneko .Any dealers that like the Sakai koi please email asap as more of these koi can be bought but i need to know tonight as tomorrow is my last day .