built a livewell for big fish tournaments

[Ace Laserna]

Well, I decided to enter my first catfish tournament this coming weekend. So, all I needed was a livewell to keep the big ones alive until weigh then release them.

I ran into Scott Cannon (Big Fish Guide Service) at Deep Bottom Landing last weekend and got some pointers from him. His advice helped tremendously.

I went to Wal-Mart and bought a 750gph Aerator pump ($19.87), 2 alligator clips ($.97) and some flex tubing (don't rememeber how much that was).

I got an old 150 qt cooler and pulled the drain plug out of it. The aerator pump fits perfecty in the stock drain plug hole. I only had to drill one hole to run the flex tubing through. I then used a soldering iron to burn holes in the tubing to spray the water back into the cooler. The stock drain plug fit perfectly into the end of the flex tube to cap it off. I then used stainless screws to hold the tubing in place.
I'll see how well it holds up to a cat in the cooler. If he rips the flex tubing off I'll probably just switch over to PVC.
Lemme know what y'all think. Any opinions would be appreciated. This is my first attempt at this. The only thing I have left is a strainer so no junk gets sucked into the pump. I'm still trying to find that part. All the other parts were on the same shelf at wal-mart.

I'm just going to strap it to the 2 cleats up front for tournaments.

[NCangler]

Ace, Now that is awesome! Thanks for sharing this. Do you mind if I post this in my NCangler.com fishing forum? Or if you'd like to register there and add it that would be great too. I'm sure many folks would enjoy this.

[Ace Laserna]

Not a problem at all. Go ahead and share!
The tournaments are only once a month so I didn't want to build anything permanent. It turned out to be very inexpensive (because I had a cooler already) and seems to work well. It should keep a 50+ lb catfish alive so I can get it to weigh in then release it.

-Ace

[NCangler]

Done!

http://www.ncangler.com/forums/f8/ho...ator-5071.html

BTW let us know how it works after the tournament and catch em up!

[k9reno]

Has anybody seen these. http://cgi.ebay.com/Keepalive-460-ae...QQcmdZViewItem


They look like they would be great portable bait tanks. some are insulated some glow so you can see in them. there are a variaty of sizes.

[NCangler]

These are pretty cool:

http://keepfishalive.com/index.php

[Ace Laserna]

The livewell worked awesome! We had a 30 lb and a 12 lb in there for at least 5 hours. After weigh in the swam away full of energy back home to their holes.