You certainly don’t have to have a college degree in fishery biology to be successful keeping healthy live bait in livewells all day, but you have to maintain excellent livewell water quality or your fish will surely die in your livewell every summer for years.
Forget the salesman’s line, all the facts and information how to be successful is only 1 mouse click away for anyone with the desire to fix the summer livewell mortality problems. If you are a live bait fisherman you know that sloppy dying bait not fit to fish with. All you have to do is read it, learn it and practice it… it is as simple as that.
If you plan or by accident overstock your livewell in the summer it dies.
This is all that is necessary to keep your bait alive and healthy all day in any overstocked livewell in the summer:
1. Oxygenate livewell water with pure oxygen – 100% DO Saturation or greater guarantees and insures safe oxygenation in overcrowded livewells and bait tanks in the summer. More bait requires more oxygen – maintain 100% DO Saturation is how professional live bait transporters (fish hatcheries and shiner dealers) transport all live fish, they use 100% compressed oxygen.
2. Ventilate livewell water – Total or partial water exchange several time daily guarantees elimination ammonia, acid pH, dissolved CO2, nitrites, nitrates and metabolic waste.
Google: “keeping live bait in livewells in the summer”
Plenty of great info here. “Thinking out of the box,” be successful every summer and you can learn how to really manage your livewell water quality and bring all the live bait you want bring if you really want to learn to learn about maintaining great livewell water quality.