Rotten Fish

Guys,
I want to share a unpleasant experience with you all. After our last tourny a sm passed away from stress and after weighing in we put him back in the livewell to dispose of later.
Later ended up a week later.
On noticing a strong rotten fish odor coming from my champion that had been parked, covered in the sun all week, I went to dispose of the source only to find a stinking damp mass of maggots in the livewell. Fff...ing Gross! After countless rinsings and scrubbings the smell is still there in the carpeting and livewell. A cloud of flies now reside in my floating tackle box, and I will never again store dead fish any longer than necessary.

eah I have been there and done that and it sucks....BIGTIME. It took a whole offseason for the stench to fade even after constant rinsing
. About 10 years ago I was the Tournament director for my club. WE had a tourney on Champlain and i wanted to be sure the smallies were released into deep water. Myself and another boat were "runners". We had everyone dump their fish into our livewells and we ran them out to the deeper cooler water. Well I must have missed one Like you, a month later I pulled the cover off my boat and the smell knocked me over
Be careful of what you put into your livewell to clean it. Any residue left behind can be deadly to the bass.

if i had been there i wouldn`t have let it happen, lol, that sucks i`m heading down to eastham to go fish my all-time favorite herring run fed pond hopping for the 10 i`m always looking for good luck cleaning that mess no work till thursday lotsa fishing

Try generous amounts of white vinegar to rinse things down. It's cheap and effective at killing nasty odors.

Thanks guys for the info.

Concerned about adding anything to the livewell though. Vinegar will not be a problem? I feel terrible about any dead bass, never mind a limit.

ever had a 30 gallon bucket with shiners, no pump in 95 degrees ?

see where i am going with that ? a solid silvery gel topped with silver and gold grave digger flies