This afternoon while my dad and I were carrying some boxes off my front porch he stopped to watch a large frog hop into my pond. When he looked over at the pond he noticed a patch of orange laying on top of the parrots feather in the middle of the pond. To my shock my big orange and black koi was laying on it's side only partly in the water on top of the plants unable to get back fully into the water. Even taking a long pole and pushing down on the mat of plants it was resting on didn't get it fully back in the water. I had to get down on my hands and knees, lean out over the pond and drag the the plants closer so that I could pick the koi up and get it back in the water where it was quick to swim off.

After that scare I spent the next 15 minutes pulling parrots feather out of the pond, ending up with enough plants to completely fill a 2 foot deep x 2 feet across pot. And there still a lot more of it in the pond but now the fish have quite a bit more open area to swim. I was just lucky that the day has been overcast with the occassional sprinkle of rain since I have no idea how long the koi was stranded like that.

Here's a picture from early this year of the koi I nearly lost today.