I did and what loquat149 said.
I wasn't diving when stocking my self caught mini reef so only by wading and tide pooling. I preferred a fine mesh net, coarser nets catch and damage the protective coating. Very little didn't thrive or, far to well. Bait type bucket w/ventilation and a battery driven air stone. I had one bad Ich experience from too stressed travel. I'd give a lot more space, bigger and more buckets if longer travel as well as insulation for less dramatic temp changes. I'm not saying quarantine is useless just; it was those fish when broke out 3 weeks after and a big debate over treat everyone or eliminate.
Be aware of the temperature things live in, may have to make sacrifices combining them or averaging it. Same with space issues to accommodate hiders and free swimmers, light and dark seekers, bottom dwellers, mid-water and surface hanger outers. Then those pesky heavy eaters that live where you never see them anyway.
Unless of course maintaining multiple tanks is even more fun when you aren't getting paid to. Good you know the challenge of coral. Geeze I got tired of water changes and stopped keeping that much diversity happy. Diversity (and stocking) I mean by what you see, can catch, enjoying the time spent to catch vs. willing to pay for. It is harder to just say no to what you can catch and easier when one fish might be a lot of $ down the toilet.
Be aware fish are a lot smarter than you may think and some are brilliant. I expect the entire life spent evading caught and eaten for that long has something to do with it. Loved the invertebrates and a whole lot easier to catch. The two handed net to net method was my only success with fish.
Brought home a few surprises in apparently dead coral, even on shore. Crab are good at containing the previously unseen, unwanted mollusk population but also effective hunters of other slow swimmers.
If you have the Ghost Anemone, they appear out of nowhere and take over; I would not try to bring any in.
Snapping shrimp got irritating at night and impossible to catch, traps a total waste of $. The rest were really, really cool. Had to take care to create places the crabs couldn't work their way in to.
Cukes were fascinating, one stowaway quite alarming at first. Be absolutely certain you know what kind it is before putting in a bucket with other, some dont take moving well and pollute that small of space.
Pretty much scraped a little fingernail size Damsel off a just dried tide pool, couldn't bear just leaving it weakly gasping there. Rewarding until ended up the tank bully, what they say about Damsels is true. Although, I was much happier solving that with a return trip to the ocean. We have a tide pool goby that was difficult not to catch, as well as the Damsels. Never could catch a much desired Butterfly, few of any.
I swear a snake eel was embarrassed at so easily reach and scooped up near the shore. On the other hand another moray contained in a tide pool was smarter than the average eel and took a couple of hours. The only place to corner him was with my back to the ocean and he knew the wave set timing. All he had to do was indicate ready to dart one way or the other a second longer and I'd have to make my way to safer ground. The split second I turned I swear I heard a na, na, nana as he meandered off along side. Frustrating to do it over, and over, and over again and I always wondered if he didn't just decide to take the free lunch. That guy had personality, relatively friendly and was my favorite eel.
Have fun.
