With the snow getting heavier and no let up in sight  , i knew today was going to be a long stressful cold one ! But being a half glass full kind of guy i was still looking forward to getting up the mountains to one of   Marusei koi farms other facilities . This is where he keeps a lot of his bigger koi , after digging our way into the farm we started catching up larger examples of koi . First one was a 65cm Yamabuki ogon , then a 70cm very good chagoi and then after getting a little enthusiastic ended up buying a nearly 90cm chagoi . From here we went to see his younger brother Maruhiro where we had some go sanke of better quality that he had selected for us to look through .As always we wernt to be disapointed , with many good examples to pick through we soon had a nice dozen nisai that i was very happy with ! Next up a  nice showa that Mark Chetter had seen on our October trip , Mark loved the koi then but , had concerens about the sumi not coming up , this time as the breeder had said , the sumi was already improving , so as ever the eagle eye Mark saw it as soon as he looked at it in the pond and bowled it . This was then purchased and will be left in Japan this summer . Not to be outdone at this one of my favourite farms , i looked at some sansai myself with a view to leave in Japan , two showas and a hi utsuri . I wasnt so keen on the utsuri as the differant colour  pecks , but the breeder was saying about how big the koi would get and he really liked it , and it helped us get a good deal on the two showas . Both the showas have very good skin quality , and should do well in Maruhiros mud ponds , the larger of the showa has slight rubs on the cheeks , this will be ok after the summer in the mud ponds , as for the Hi Utsuri i am very intereasted to see this in October as i have seen koi that i have turned down which he has recomended to leave come out of the mudpond way better than i could have imagined  . Time seems to be flying past so quick this trip , after curried rice at the farm it was off to Kaneko . This breeders fish are always nice , and i really like his shiro utsuri and kujaku . After lookiung around at the nisai , we bowled some nice nisai kujaku , but wasnt happy with all of them so we passed and spent some time just looking at the stunning sansai pond ! Unfortuantely i know these koi are a little out of my price range so we moved on to Marusei looking for more Yamabuki ogons and other nisai . The farm was very busy so we started on nisai around 35-40 , some very intereasting koi , including red kujakus and some hi showa and another dozen ogons . After noticing it was getting dark again , and it was already time to call it a day . I am struggling this week , time seems to fly past , but im happy with the koi we have and will round off tomorrow with a few more koi and then time to get the  bullet train back to Tokyo and then onto Narita airport for our flight Saturday home