LAFB Elite Community

Discuss inshore fishing with like-minded anglers willing to fish smarter.

  • Daniel_Gig

    Member
    February 3, 2025 at 6:52 pm

    So typically I keep all my legal sized fish in the live well, even if I’m keeping fish, I throw them in the live well first. That way if I don’t catch the quantity I need, i can release the 1-4 fish, there’s nothing worse than cleaning one fish lol. Or like today, i used the live well so I could keep fishing while the bite was good. Then when i hit a lull in the action, id stop and tag a few at a time.

    Exceptions to using the livewell are:

    •Undersized fish (legal reasons and see below)

    •Upper slot fish (I don’t wanna kill a large trout or redfish), I’ll still tag these but I stop what I’m doing and tag them at time of capture. I’ve accidentally killed them before by leaving too many in my livewell for too long.

    • I don’t use the livewell if it’s extremely hot. If you use a livewell normally, you know the fish will die quickly if there’s too many and it’s too hot.

    The only time I tag undersized fish is when im trying to tag a bunch of fish, and they are all undersized. Or redfish. I try to tag all the reds because I feel like they are tougher and will survive the tag better.

    Once you get the kit, download the “anglers almanac” app. It makes recording them on the water way easier. I used to manually record them, but that’s time consuming. I used to always keep fish any time I had more than 5 fish. I tagged twice as many last year as I did in the first 2.5 years. Started realizing we weren’t really eating THAT much fish. And killing them to feed the dog seemed wasteful. That’s my current process, I’m sure I’ll refine it more as I tag more.

    • This reply was modified 4 days, 18 hours ago by  Daniel_Gig.
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