How do you keeping fish on a kayak?

Hello,

I'm new here and was wondering...

For a cheap fish bag cooler, has anyone ever filled a garbage bag(white would be best I assume) with ice?

I suspect you’d accomplish just as much with wet burlap or an old (and wet) towel.

I bleed and throw into a bag cooler.  I'm picky about dead fish sitting in warm environments for too long

This... You will end up with meat that’s much  firmer and better tasting if you bonk/bleed/gut/ice right after catching.

For freshwater fish (trout mostly) I either use a small hard cooler or one of those cheap insulated cooler-style grocery bags from Trader Joes. For saltwater I use a Kill Bag made by Sea Angler.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

In saltwater I always use one of my old ab diving tubes (Not totally inflated).  I clip it to the side of the yak and throw it over the side...keeps fish alive all day and no blood in the water or any troubles with furbags.

I like the wet burlap idea while one is in motion.  Can you recommend a place to get the burlap bags?  I do know the lawn mower shops carry these 6 foot square burlap tarps but I'm not certain they're contaminant free. 

I like the wet burlap idea while one is in motion.  Can you recommend a place to get the burlap bags?  I do know the lawn mower shops carry these 6 foot square burlap tarps but I'm not certain they're contaminant free.

Michael’s, joane fabrics, etc.

I like to use those cheap insulation bags couples with this reusable cooler called cooler shock. It's supposedly better than ice. I'm not a fan of those blue coolers you find in lunch bags because they don't really last that long. I've also just tossed fish inside of my kayak 

I think that it's important to get fish into ice as soon as I catch them, so I strap a hard-sided cooler containing a garbage bag with ice cubes in the rear cargo area of my Revolution.  The garbage bag reduces clean-up hassle at the end of the day.  I use four nylon straps with buckles to strap down my cooler so it can't come out of position if I get flipped over; don't use bungie cords to hold a cooler on your kayak, because a cooler can twist out of position in your cargo area if you get trundled.  I put a strong bungie over the lid of the cooler, and pull it over to the side of the cooler when I need to get into the cooler.  If you just lay fish on top of ice cubes, the top fish can get pretty warm, and it's surprisingly difficult to scoop ice out from under several fish and dump it on top of the fish, so I put some ice cubes in a fishing net or a nylon mesh bag which I can lift up and drop on top of the fish when I add another fish.

To keep the quality of my fish high, I usually cut their gills or gut them, and let them bleed out for a while on a stringer before I put them on ice.  But I live in Montana, where we don't have any sea lions, seals, or sharks.  So far. We have bears, but I haven't had any problem with them swimming out into lakes in an effort to steal my fish.

However, it's difficult to find a hard sided cooler which is long enough for big fish.  You can bend pretty big fish into a "U" shape, but eventually they get too big to jam into a cooler, as shown in the second picture below.  One option for big fish is to put some bottles of ice and a big garbage bag with some ice cubes under your front hatch.

I like the hard-sided cooler option as well.  This one is low profile and about $20:
https://www.amazon.com/Coleman-25-Quart-Party-Stacker-Cooler/dp/B00363PSBE