I invented this bait bucket when I couldn’t keep my bait, alive for any length of time. I was using a regular small bait bucket bought in a bait and tackle store with the spring loaded door with holes in it. Those bait buckets always float with the cover out of the water and only 3-4 inches of water in them that isn’t moving. The result is that they would either bake in the sun or die from lack of oxygen. At night they just die from lack of oxygen. I tried shrimp, minnows, menhaden, finger mullet, you name the bait, it all died.
Being a submariner, I know how to get salt water to flow into something; you just punch a hole in it. But if you want flow through a vessel, you gotta have 2 holes. One to come in and one to go out. That’s why those little bait buckets kill the bait. They don’t allow flow through the bucket. I figured some strong netting would do the trick. The netting I selected is UV resistant and flexible. The holes are small enough to keep the shrimp in but offer very low resistance to flow. That solved the flow issue. To address the sun issue, I make all the buckets 18 inches deep regardless of length. To provide some rigidity and to make it float, I added a PVC frame. The original ones all had legs but then I realized that collapsible ones will help with storage issues. The collapsible aspect is particularly attractive in instances like private boats where space is limited and storage room is minimal. The collapsible ones store in about 7 inches when leaned against the wall.
The supplementary strength of legs is important in cross currents. If you live on the water and you want to store your crabs or bait fish, but your dock has a stiff cross current, you need a bait bucket that will stay submerged in the water instead of being lifted out by the line it’s attached to. To have flow, a bucket needs a “goes inta” and a “goes outa”. The holes in the back of the bucket are normally the goes inta and the holes in the cover are the goes outa. With a stiff current, the bucket tends to float with the cover out of the water which removes the “goes outa” therefore, there is no water flow. Once the flow stops, the bait die. This is what happens to a normal small plastic bait bucket when it is attached to a dock with any kind of current. But that doesn’t happen in the BBB&CC. The netting lets water flow through almost unimpeded.
During our annual reunion, we always keep one crab trap in the water. The crabs that we caught would end up in various freezers until there were enough for a boil. Those crabs just weren’t fresh. I decided to keep the crabs fresh in the water they were pulled from. I built a big 6 foot by 3 foot Better Bait Bucket and put them in that. The finger mullet that were too big to use as bait were striped and fed to the crabs. I had as many as 4 dozen large keeper crabs in that Crab Corral and it wasn’t packed at all.
We have found more uses for this thing. We’ve used a 3 foot by 3 foot to keep schooly stripers alive while keeping the bigger ones and putting back the smaller ones. The important note there is that the smaller ones were still alive because they were put back in the water immediately.
This thing just works and it’s simple to use.
Patent Pending: The USPTO has assigned Provisional Application number 60/854,881 dated 10/27/2006 to this invention.
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