So not sure if this has been discussed much before so I thought hey why not start a thread about it. I wanted to see what other people do when they buy corals somewhere out of state and know they won’t be able to get them home for 24-48 hours.
Me personally longest trip I think I did with corals in a styrofoam cooler was 14 -16 hours from WWC in florida. All survived.
I am planning to go to reef a palooza in new York which is a short trip so that’s easy but what about those swaps that you make a long weekend out of.
Do some searches about transporting corals without water. It is CRAZY. Supposedly they tolerate longer trips better that way. I haven’t brought corals home on a plane before, but that was the suggested route and placing them in thermos bottle with your carry on.
2 years ago I went to MACNA in DC which was about a 3 hour trip for me. I took i think 2-3 partial buckets (I bought a lot of coral there…so you might get by with 1 bucket) of saltwater and had the same number of battery air pumps (plus backup batteries as they were running to keep the water aerated), a couple small heaters that I would plug into the hotel and let the corals stay in the bags for both days I was there and came home the second night. Its been awhile and quite remember, but I may have lost 1 or 2 corals out of 20+.
I forgot to mention that I drove…obviously flying complicates things a bit.