DIY fish counter (eliminate the asterisk)

When I’m fishing, I often lose track of how many fish I’ve kept.  Here’s a simple fish counter I made from two reproduction Fender amplifier knobs ($2.25 apiece from Tube Depot.com, https://tubedepot.com/products/knob-reproduction-for-blackface-silverface-amps?gclid=CMuI4NrFvc4CFY81aQodBKMPOA ), a piece of scrap black plastic with a right angle bend, and some hardware store parts.  I included a rubber washer cut from an old bike inner tube behind each knob to provide friction.  I can keep track of double digit numbers of a single kind of fish, or single digit numbers of two different kinds of fish.





This fish counter will help you avoid the asterisk in your fishing reports, as in the following situations, when the daily limit is ten fish:

On Saturday I caught nine fish.*  On Sunday I caught 11 fish.**

*I lost track of how many fish I had kept, and thought I had ten fish in my cooler.  If I had known that I only had nine fish, I could easily have caught one more, so I would have had a full limit.
**I told the game warden that I had lost track of how many fish I had kept, and it was an honest mistake, but he just shrugged his shoulders and wrote out a ticket.

(Note: this example is only for sake of illustration. I have never kept more than the limit of fish, and have never been given a ticket by a game warden.)

I have found this device to be helpful.  But there are still opportunities for operator error.  Instead of thinking "Wait, is this my 7th fish or my eighth fish?" I found myself thinking "Wait, did I already count that fish?"  So I have been waiting to count a fish until I actually dump it in my cooler.