Collection: Live Bait & Bait Catching

Cast nets, sabiki rigs, buckets, aerators and dip nets — everything for catching your own bait and keeping it alive.

Live bait you caught this morning outfishes anything you can buy, and it is the single thing that most changes what you can catch. Snook, tarpon, kingfish and cobia all commit to a live bait in a way they will not to an artificial.

There are two ways to get it, and you need both.

A cast net is unbeatable in shallow water. Three numbers decide which one — radius, mesh size and lead weight per foot. Get those wrong and you will fight the net rather than catch bait.

A sabiki rig is the answer where a net cannot reach. Over a deep wreck, around a channel marker, or off a pier with bait sitting in thirty feet, a net is useless and a sabiki is the only tool that works.

Then you have to keep it alive, which people underestimate. Bait dies from heat and lack of oxygen, and in warm Florida water a bucket of pilchards can go from lively to floating inside an hour. A bucket and an aerator is the difference between fishing all day and fishing until nine.

Handle bait with a dip net, never your hands — grabbing strips the slime coat and a damaged bait swims wrong and gets refused.

Guides: How to throw a cast net · Choosing a cast net