Martin came by the following day. He sat with Daniel and me at the kitchen table while we discussed what an actual commercial arrangement might look like. The trust wasn't willing to give away an established genetic line, and I wouldn't have expected it to. Martin proposed a licensed management relationship in which the trust retained agreed breeding rights and historical records, while a new operating company would be responsible for facilities, husbandry, production, and properly documented sales.
"There will have to be standards," Martin said. "Health testing, traceability, reporting, and inspections. Some animals will need to be separated by line or purpose, and we need to know exactly what remains of the original registered population."
"I want all of that in writing," I replied. "You can understand why I'm sensitive about people moving fish on handshakes."
Martin smiled. "After what you've been through, I'd be disappointed if you weren't."
The process was neither immediate nor free. Daniel drafted terms, Martin reviewed them with the trust, and Leah's office outlined regulatory conditions that would apply if we proceeded. Tom returned with a more complete evaluation of water needs and operating costs. We agreed from the beginning that no sale of registered stock would occur without legal authority, health clearance, and the documentation a buyer would need.
It was a less glamorous beginning than discovering a fortune in the water. Most evenings I found myself reading documents about quarantine procedures, mortality reporting, and the difference between selling fish for stocking and selling fish for food. Yet the work had a familiar shape. It resembled the maintenance planning I'd done for heavy equipment: know what you own, know what you can legally operate, understand the failure points, and don't promise performance you haven't measured.
One afternoon Martin asked me a question I didn't expect. "Why are you doing this, Robert? You could insist the proper owner remove the animals at its own expense and be done with the matter. You didn't ask to become a fish farmer."
I thought about that before answering. "I didn't ask for any of this. But the fish are here, and some of them might be part of something people worked decades to build. I don't like waste. I also have a grandson who looks at this pond and sees work worth learning. Those seem like good reasons to find out whether the opportunity is real."
He nodded slowly. "That's a much better answer than the number on the old appraisal."
The weeks that followed taught me how slowly a legitimate business takes shape, even when the starting stock appears overnight. Tom's revised model projected about $180,000 in first-year gross revenue if the necessary permits, facilities, buyers, and production conditions came together. A second year could exceed $300,000 if we scaled the operation responsibly, but every figure had assumptions attached. I put the spreadsheets beside a separate page listing costs we could not afford to ignore.