Minnow Quantity Calculator

There’s a particular kind of live bait remorse reserved for anglers who go out to fish. It usually comes near end of the day when you discover you have exactly one shiner left and two hungry walleyes waiting. Do you try to stretch your single last bait? Or do you clutch at thin air as line grabs down? The outcome seldom has anything to do with ability. It has everything to do with math.

Impulse is a terribble way to purchase live bait. A glance at a bagful is all it takes for most fishermen to grab a bag at the shop. No thought goes into whether there is enough baits for a trip, how far the bait has to travel in the trunk of a hot car, or how long it might take to get home. Guessing at those details results in a costly education in science of logistics.

How to Plan Your Live Bait Needs

To do so, it converts these fuzzy parameters into cold hard numbers. It requires only inputs relevant to the real world, such as expected bite activity. How many angler will be out there? What about your expected hourly catches? Your planned hours? These factors gets plugged into the calculator above (available here), which then makes projections about what percentage of bait your fish will eat.

It even factors in handling fatigue, casting errors and snag losses to account for what doesn’t make it into the fishs mouth. Since they won’t stop breathing until you put them in the tank, the calculator includes some reserve buffer for travel time too. This moves the thought process away from counting and instead into biology; a July heat wave changes the survivability of a minnow in a crowded bucket vs. Another is chilling in a livewell inside an ice shack. So the calculator takes this into consideration, dialing down or up its recommendations depending on both your water temp and aeration quality. That way when you get to the ramp, your bait isn’t half dead.

The other level of planning is understanding bait turnover. Anglers fail to realize just how fast live bait tire under pressure. You can hook a minnow through the lip and maybe get an hour’s worth of action out of it. But it will tire out. It will stop swimming naturaly and no longer hold as much appeal for the eye of any predator fish before it expires.

Even when they’re not biting, frequent bait rotation is key. The plan includes extra turns to account for the loss of bait from actual hookups. With vertical jigging, you may want to rotate your bait every 20 minutes to keep things fresh. For slip-bobber fishing for crappie, you’ll go through bait because those little ones will be stripping the hook off before a lunker ever gets a look at it. Both of these situations will chew up inventory faster then your gut tells you until you’ve seen it projected.

The other factor is size. Catfish suckers and large pike suckers will make your arms tired fast since they are heavy. On the other hand small crappie minnows hardly weigh anything at all, which allows you to carry dozens of them in a single pound! Conversely, large suckers are much more water hungry; they requires significantly more water volume per dozen to stay alive. The chart below breaks this down for you and will help you convert how many fish you want to get to actual amounts such as bags or scoops. For example, a “scoop” is the industry standard for ordering bulk quantities, but a scoop means nothing if you don’t know the size of each bait. If you know that medium shiners weigh around two ounces per dozen, now you have an idea of how many should fit in your cooler with enough water to keep them oxygenated for the day.

Crowding is the quiet assassin in live bait trips. You could purchase every fish alive in town but crowd them into a tiny bucket with insufficient aeration and they’ll be dead before you pull out of the parking lot. The tool compares your holding water volume to suggested densities and alerts you when you’re overloading. That’s particularly important with bigger bait such as jumbo suckers that generate lots of waste and consume more oxygen. Don’t mix big bait with smaller, fragile minnows; it stresses them out and causes them to eat each other. Both stress and crowding reduce survival rates regardless of water temps.

Finally, we have the reserve buffer. Who wants to purchase 20 percent excess supply? Seems like a waste of money… until bad luck strikes. No restocking is available on remote launches and tournament pressure lasts for many hours. Running out of bait at the wrong second will put a major damper on your day. You’ll never regret having too much bait in the livewell, whereas running dry in the middle of prime fishing can be extremely frustrating.

Always try to maintain how much you can hold while controlling how fast you use it. Your strategy should have survive the entire journey, not merely the first cast. Keep ’em wet and alive as long as humanly possible.