Today was a busy day in Niigata, with the famous sakai auction and a show going on it was always going to be hard finding people around. The plan for today was to pick up all the non go sanke orders, as usual the best laid plans..............One breeder to watch for the future is the son of Hirasawa, his quality is getting better every year. We started of with some smaller nisai 30-38cm, many varieys available and we tried to pick the orders first but things change as always. The hariwake is reserved for a customer and just within the budget so two of us are happy! The breeder then had to leave quickly to judge the koi show. On our way to mushigame we deciede to call at marasaka, he was away harvesting but the agent called him and he was happy to come back. I really like this place all the family are very friendly and more to the point his sanke are old style jimbei blood line. There was a pond with some nice sansai all female, we bought a very nice sanke, tancho sanke (sumi is so thick and strong and he says more will come), a very clean kujaku with a nice pattern which the father said will grow over 80 cm, and then lastly a sanke which had secondary hi on the face but its what Peter Barnes would call a project, I just liked the big sumi so typical of jimbei so I thought id buy her anyway and see what can be done (Pete can you give me a ring, I need a quick favour............lol) From here it was on to hiroi and hoping that he had some nice showa, sadly he diddnt, but we managed to buy 4 more sanke, very thick beuatiful sumi and very good skin, even though you could see that they had just been harvested unfortuantley the photos dont show the skin and colours clearly. One thing that did surprise me here was that the breeder would not commit to sexing the nisai, he said to early, guess thats why he had a few male sansai knocking around. Then we bowled a fantastic sanke, 60cm female, sansai, a very good price but again the pound is still not in our favour so it made it a bit tight, but we havnt finsihed with the negotiations, steve the cabby (south london) watch this space I know you said nisai, but what the hell!!!! Also have the shiro as well now Steve! Early day as it was sunday so on the way back we saw hirasawa and said we were looking for some benigoi and he said we have some, nisai 50 -55cm, so guess were we are going tommorrow. So although a quiet day we have seen some bigger and better fish and made plans for tommorrow, I know people are keen to see the prices go up on the sale pages please bare with us im hoping to start pricing in the next 24 hours.