Brine said:
The rubbermaid totes seemed too flimsy for my taste, not to mention I like the fact that the cooler is built to insulate. The other bonus is when I need a 120qt cooler, I have one. It's aslo nice to be able to lift the entire lid open for cleaning and it also makes it easy to get a visual on all the fish to make sure everyone is doing good rather than looking through a hole.
Quite frankly, I built it to fish one tourney, back in November, when the insulation wasn't an issue. I had really planned on building a nicer one later on, so I just made this one on the cheap to get me through the one tourney, but for whatever reason, it has worked so nicely, I didn't change it. I thought the Rubbermaid would be too flimsy, but once I riveted the lid on, and cut a smaller hole in the lid, it is actually stronger than I thought. Mine is probably put through a little more abuse than y'alls are, as I fish in 30 - 50 boat tourneys on Allatoona, where I am blasting off with around 40 or more 18 - 21 foot bass boats with 150 horse or better. Thus, I am bouncing over 4 + foot wakes in a flat bottom boat, as the wakes of 40 boats in a fairly narrow channel start to combine, and just make huge wakes, and even through that, I haven't had it sag at all, which really surprised me.
Since all my tournaments have been either winter tourneys, or night tourneys, for whatever reason (just happened to fit my schedule best that way), the temperature hasn't been an issue. I usually have the liveliest fish at the weigh in as well, provided I can actually catch some fish to bring to the weigh in. :roll: