I thought I'd go through a typical day of fishing.
Part 1 - The prep
There are a lot of things to do to get ready for a day of fishing. When we first started, it took us about 1 1/2 hours from the time we got up until the time we left the dock. We have continually worked to get this time down.
First is the human necessities. Sunglasses, suntan lotion, food and drinks, and assorted other things that we like to have out there. Biggerwife usually makes us sandwiches which takes a bit of time. After a while, we've got this mental checklist down so we aren't running around trying to figure out what we forgot.
Then we have the fishing tackle. Rods and reels, tackle box(es), and other essential fishing supplies like knives and pliers. We have slowly started to keep some of these on the boat but there are some things we just have to lug. The distance to the boat is about 200 yds. but there is so much stuff we generally load it into the truck and drive the short distance. It seems like it wouldn't be too far to tote everything, but it is.
We have 10 fishing poles as of right now. There is a huge shark rig, a grouper rod, a tarpon rod, a heavy snapper rig, and 6 lightweight spinning rods. That's a lot to carry.
Not only do we have to haul them, we have to rig them all up. Because we do other kinds of fishing, they are often not rigged for offshore. And, we have to re-tie many of them because of frayed line. This usually takes about 30 minutes.
The new boat has a lot more room, so we now keep the lightweight rods in the boat, as well as most of the tackle. We can't fit all the rods in a secure place, so we still carry the big (4) rods to the boat. Saltwater rusts stuff pretty quickly, so we don't keep the pliers or knives on the boat. One week out in the salt air and the pliers lock up. Once the get rusty, you might as well throw them away. You can WD-40 them to loosen them up but it takes a while and they almost immediately seize up again.
The biggest pain in the butt is ice. We need a lot to keep any fish we catch cold so they don't go bad. The boat comes with an ice box but it is big, and it isn't insulated very well. It will hold ice through the day, but not overnight. It takes about 150 lbs. to fill it up, but we rarely put near that much in there. About 50 lbs or so will do it if we don't catch too many fish. Fortunately we have an icemaker at the pool at the condo complex. We fill up several 5 gallon buckets and haul them to the boat. The whole procedure is difficult and time consuming, though.
As stated earlier, all of this prep work takes about an hour and a half right now. We want to get this down.
I'm now starting to do a lot of this the night before. We haul the big rods over and get all the proper lures tied on, and bring whatever bags we can keep overnight and just leave them in the boat.
I recently bought a fish kill bag. It looks like this:
After doing some research, it looks like this will hold ice for several days. Instead of getting ice at the condo icemaker (which is super slow), I can run down to the nearest tackle store (less than 5 minutes) and have them fill it up. It's pretty cheap. Then I can just put it in the boat the night before.
Our goal is to be able to get up and be out of the dock within 45 minutes. I'd like this to be even shorter but biggerwife likes to have coffee and sort of wake up a bit. That's fine.