Thanks, Watermom.

The organic thing was my best (uneducated) guess. I removed the leaves as I said but there's still some junk in there and I don't have the filter running yet. It's still getting down near freezing at night and the water is cold, so I think I'll leave it alone until next weekend and go ahead and open the pool. Looks like the weather will be improving and since I'm new to this I'm going to open early to get a handle on everything.

My CYA was around 100 last year at closing (while I was still listening to the pool store and dumping tri-chlor in there ). I did take a sample to the pool store when I first pulled the cover back a couple of weeks ago at they measured it at 50 but I've already found out the hard way that if you don't mix up the water somehow prior to testing you won't necessarily get a accurate, representative sample. I have Ben's test kit and I'll go ahead and test the CYA myself.

Lenny