The spring trip can be a little more frustrating than the Autumn one , in the sence you can struggle a little more for what you want , ie quality , quantity and even varietys . Today was a little like that at times . We started out at Yamazaki koi farm , i love this farm as he has so many varietys , ive been asked for some non go sanke so what a great place to start . Started of in a pond of nisai , which seemed to have most varietys , soon had some great doitsu hariwake , gin matsuba ogans , benigoi and many others .Then moved onto a better quality pond for some gin rin hi usturi and shiro utsuri , much bigger than the 30cm one we were picking before , these were 40-45cm with one smaller really nice shiro utsuri .Aftr this an intresting discusion took place about some special tosai mixes which i am mulling over . From here it was off to Kanno to hopefully hand select sone high quality tosai , on arrival first disapointment of the day as the tosai wernt really ready to be selcted . So we started chatting generally about koi and the uk market , he asked how many of his koi had we sold , when i replied nearly all , he smiled and uncovered a pond and pointed and said buy some more . I shook my head and said low quality , bearing in mind last vist i selected 25 nisai and knew he had no more to harvest . He replied that these were better , moved up frm the bette koi house so it could be used for tosa . I loooked in and saw that these were indeed were very nice. Nervously i asked the price as i had bought from the other fish house and its not for the faint hearted lol , not cheap , but not unresonable.So i selected three female goshiki , and asked for him to  t recomend two selections, first a very nice male goshiki , and then a female sanke which he had high hopes for good growth , it had amazing skin quality so very happy . Fom here we went to Kaneko , although i was happy with the koi i had selected , i was getting worreid about selecting better quality tosai , and he always has tosai to select .On arrival the tosai were much smaller than usual so i passed , but ended up buying somevey nice nisai of all wierd ad wondefull varietys adsomevey high qulity includng a small tancho sanke . After here we went to Shintaro where we alway select tosai ,again getting disapointed awaited , Saito showed us his tosai , they had  already been well picked trough .Now i was getting seriously worried that tings were looking bad for better quality tosai , a quick vist to Yagenji soon changed that , all though not allowed to hand select he made us a offer on some very  nice tosai which helped me out . So after a day of  ups an own things were not so bad . Thinking it was time for coffee , we decieded to ring some breeders to save time, fortune smiled on us , One of the breeders had tosai avaiable to select through on Thursday , result ! Then another call resulted in another breeder having some very high grade tosai to  select  through on Thursday.Things were really looking up , just as we were going to drive off , the phone rang , it was another breder , would we be intereased in hand selecting tosai first thing Tuesday morning , well i had to think about it for a milli second. Today finished up great , and now tomorrow was already shaping up quite nicely. !!!