Crouch Valley Koi Club seems to be in full summer swing, the May auction had only just finished and before they knew it along came June and it was time for their 2010 Closed Koi Show at the South Essex Garden Show at Barleylands.

Thursday 10th June saw the 1st day on the show ground for setting up the show, many of the garden dealers stalls had already arrived at Barleylands and had already begun to errect their pitches.

It was not long before the Crouch Valley members had the marquees up and vats had been organised, and was ready to fill with water. This year the show has been modified to include extra vats for exhibitors this now pushed the number up to fifteen vats.

A big thank you must go to the members that give up their time from work and schedules during the day to get the show setup in swift time. Thank you.

Day two saw the final changes to the layout and airlines and airstones being added to the vats, this was all completed by mid day ready for the arrival of Koi and so that the general public had some Koi to view.

It's showtime day three and Saturday morning, Koi were in the vat and Judging was to be taken place that day, with the show being a closed show we have a a different size allocation for the Koi, where as the BKKS will have 8 sizes of Koi we only have 3, These Koi sizes are as follows.

Size 1 & 2 are our size 1, size 3 & 4 is our size 2 and finally size 5, 6, 7 & 8 is our final size 3.

This year the show was made up of 94 Koi, the matrix for these koi was size 1 had 26 Koi entered, size 2 had 44 Koi entered and finally size 3 had 24 Koi entered, this was shaping up to be a well contested closed show.

The BKKS judges that attended on the Saturday was Bill Johnson and trainee JSC Iain Kirkbright, on that note I would like to thank them both for their time and efforts, thank you.

Also on location was Tim Fisher and John Botha from the HSC, once more we would like to thank them for their time and dedication for the welfare of the Koi, thank you.

Saturday had been a long day and normally after most shows people are looking forward to getting home and putting their feet up with a nice cold one, well not at Crouch Valley Koi Club. Being the Saturday and the day England was playing USA in their opening game of the World Cup we decided to have an after show party, so we fired up the BBQ's and got into the party spirit of the world cup.

I would like at this point to say a thanks to TC Koi for their generous offer of raffle prizes, TC Koi in Essex just off the A127 turn off for A128 has been very supportive of the Crouch Valley Koi Club in recent times, so we would like to say a big thank you to the TC Koi team.

Day four arrived and it was time for the results, so here are the awards as follows.

Grand Champion - Kin Matsuba - Fred Phillips
Mature Champion - Kohaku - Ryan Persechino
Adult Champion - Gin Rin - Chris Bellinger
Baby Champion - Kohaku - Peter Barnes
Best Vat - Laurence Harvey

Crouch Valley would like to also say a thank you to Keith Bertie for presenting the awards for us.