Reflections: The Live Box

Few discomforts compare to that which can be experienced on a steamy, still summer night in Minnesota’s lake country. What begins near sundown as a buzz high overhead can descend into a full-fledged assault during the dead of night. Cleaning fish while swatting a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitoes and wiping sweat from your eyes using a hand dripping with slime is a situation that should be avoided at all costs.

Long before our family cabin on Stalker Lake in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, had electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing, it had perhaps an even more important convenience. This amazing apparatus eliminates the need to clean fish at night.

My grandparents had friends in Lincoln, Nebraska, who introduced them to Stalker Lake on a tent camping trip in 1937. Grandma bought the cabin the following year and my grandparents continued to vacation with Kent family members for decades. Among these friends were Paul and Bessie (Kent) Shamp. Paul apparently had a tendency to get snagged quite often when casting into aquatic vegetation. This required him to either break his line or for the boat to be moved so his lure could be disconnected from the vegetation. Whenever one of my family members gets hung up today, he or she is likely to be asked, “Did you shamp us?”

Paul Shamp owned a metal manufacturing company in Lincoln. His experiences as a Seabee in World War II probably had something to do with his vocation. I’m pretty certain Paul made the live box that has resided at the end of our dock since as far back as I can remember and is still used today. This wonderful item allows us to fish into the night and delay fish cleaning until daylight hours and favorable conditions. Windy days with no rain in the forecast are best for fish cleaning because they limit the presence of both mosquitoes and biting flies.

The live box is wired to the end of the dock and measures 30 inches by 24 inches and stands 32 inches tall. The frame and the two braces on the bottom and one on the top are made of aluminum angle bar stock. Two of the sides are aluminum sheets, perforated with hand-drilled holes, while the other two sides, the bottom, and a third of the top are covered with 1/2-inch mesh hardware cloth.

Two-thirds of the top is a solid sheet of aluminum, connected to the brace with two hinges, forming a lid. The lid has a handle and a chain that once had a clip on the end that could be connected to a bracket on the frame, keeping the lid closed. The clip has disappeared, but I’m not sure what that additional security it accomplished. The lid is heavy enough to keep critters from gaining access to the inside of the box. Great blue herons can sometimes be seen standing on the live box, likely frustrated from their inability to get at what’s inside. We may have to rethink live-box security and a lot of other things if bears continue to move south.

To put fish in the box, the lid is best opened with a dip-net frame. That’s much easier than bending down to use the handle on the lid. Over time, the edge of the lid has been bent upward, making it even easier to flip the lid over with a net. Fish are transferred from the boat’s livewell to the live box via a small dip net. It’s usually a two-person operation, with one person dipping fish out of the boat and handing the net to someone on the dock, who dumps the fish into the box.

The beauty of the live box is that fish can be stored for several days, until enough are present to make cleaning worth doing. Fish seldom die in the live box, but if you want to take a photo of fish, you should do it before throwing them into the live box. Fish that spend much time in the box tend to come out with frayed fins.

A large dipnet fits inside the live box and can be used to remove most of the fish inside. There are, however, usually a couple of elusive bluegills that evade capture, requiring the box to be lifted onto the dock. Fish are placed in a five-gallon bucket and carried up the hill to the cabin for cleaning. If you accumulate a few fish over a couple of days and then hit the jackpot and come close to filling the bucket, an extended fish-cleaning operation is in store.

The spring of 2022 produced terrific crappie fishing on Stalker Lake about three days into our stay. Even with just a 10-fish limit on crappies, six family members suddenly pulling in 12- to 14-inch crappies and not wanting to stop can lead to a lot of fish. While cleaning those fish, I decided that filleting 10 crappies is a piece of cake, 20 is plenty, 30 is excessive, 40 is unreasonable, and over 50 is downright painful. I don’t use an electric fillet knife and arthritis in my hands prompted me to hand off the operation to my son after filleting 40-some.

The live box stays in the water from May through September, but we make sure no fish are present at the end of each stay. No fish ever get out on their own, but I’ve seen little green sunfish that have found their way inside—probably not a real smart move on their part.

When the dock is pulled out for the winter in September, the live box is placed on the end of the dock. Going fishing just one more time after that requires fish to be cleaned right away. I vividly remember one last time out on the lake for the season that my brother, son, and I made 20-some years ago. Rapala had just come out with Clown-colored Shad Raps and they worked like magic. We caught 2- to 3-pound walleyes hand over fist that night, sometimes three at a time. I cleaned those fish late that night, but by late September, no sweat ran down into my eyes and there were no mosquitoes to swat. A wonderful finale.

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Don Gabelhouse Jr. is retired chief of fisheries with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and an avid angler. He’s a longtime contributor to the Reflections column.

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