Can Your Livewell Cost You Fish? Alex Plick on Pressurized Livewells and Sailfish Bait

Pre-fishing days off Palm Beach, you watch a goggle-eye pen long enough to know which baits are going to swim and which are already cooked. Then it gets rough — the kind of rough that turns sailfish on and rattles a cockpit-mounted livewell apart. That swing, from “we have bait” to “we had bait,” is what Alex Plick of Wicked Wells spends his days engineering out of the boat. On this week’s episode, recorded aboard Bad Company the day before lines-in at Walker’s Cay, Alex walks through the pressurized-livewell design tree, why fiberglass beat metal in the pump-box market, and why a tournament team’s bait condition often decides the weekend before the first bait ever hits the water.

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The Bait-Survival Equation

The cockpit livewell has always been stuck on a tradeoff. Pressurize it and water leaks everywhere. Run it unpressurized and you get the slosh effect — fine on a flat day, brutal when you’re running offshore in a 4-foot stack and the baits start bouncing off the walls. According to Alex, that’s the problem Scotty Alvarez set out to solve when he started Wicked Wells back in 2010 (per Alex on the show; Wicked Wells’ own About page credits Alvarez as the founder out of three decades in the sport-fishing industry).

The current generation of Wicked wells keeps the pressurization but adds a gutter system around the top with a controllable drain valve, which Alex says lets the captain tune the flow without giving up the seal. The pitch is simple: in the only condition where it actually matters — running in rough water with the kind of $150-a-dozen bait you’ve been feeding for weeks — your bait keeps swimming.

“On the tournament scene, down here in South Florida, the sailfishermen, you go down Sailfish Marina in Palm Beach by us — 90% of the boats there have our wells,” Alex says. (That’s his number, not a SOF audit — but the dock presence is real, and the visible install base on the SFC circuit backs it.)

Sailfish-Tournament Economics

This is where the gear conversation becomes a money conversation. The tournament math Alex lays out is sharp:

• Buy-in, Calcuttas, fuel, crew. All sunk before lines-out.
• Bait at $150 a dozen for goggle-eyes, pinned three or four days before the start.
• Pre-fishing days to find the bite, beating up the same baits you’re going to fish for money.
• The bite happens on rough days. “We pray for rough days on these sailfish tournaments,” he says — flatly, like every captain reading this is already nodding.

Spend that much money and time, and the last variable in the chain — did the bait survive the ride? — becomes the differential between a check and a long ride home. Alex relays the line he heard from JC Cleary on Remix (which is JC’s, paraphrased through Alex): the difference between a winning team and a team that’s just falling short often comes down to the bait.

Alex frames the ROI bluntly: the bait you stop losing pays the well off inside a season. Drew Roanhouse on Joline has said the same on camera. For charter operators chasing goggle-eyes at night to avoid that $150-a-dozen line item, it’s the same equation — the value isn’t theoretical, it’s the bait you don’t have to throw over at the end of the day.

Metal vs. Fiberglass Pump Boxes

If the livewell is the cockpit story, the pump box is the bilge story — and according to Alex it’s the bigger market opportunity for Wicked. The competing pump boxes in the market are metal. Saltwater plus a metal box in a sealed bilge environment is a corrosion clock: most operators get two or three years before the rust shows up on the inside walls and the box has to be replaced. Alex says he and current owner Ryan looked at a fresh-from-the-shop metal box on a 39-foot Contender that was already weeping rust after a handful of trips, and decided the fiberglass version was the obvious next move.

The case Alex makes isn’t just longevity — it’s safety. He tells a customer story that’s worth quoting in full:

“I had one guy that we just redid his box. He said, hey, you know, I had a metal box in my boat. I’m running from the Dominican Republic. He had like a hundred mile run. So, he’s got his kids on board, and he’s running halfway through. He starts getting a high water alarm. He opens up his bilge hatches. Everything is filled with water. … Basically, he was rusting out from under the bottom. He had no idea.” — Alex Plick, recounting a customer’s experience

That box had been in the boat about two and a half years. The bottom floor of the pump box had rusted through, leaving two through-hulls feeding the bilge with the boat 70 miles offshore. The owner had to dive on the sea cocks and close them by hand to keep the boat afloat.

Alex’s structural argument: don’t put metal in the bilge if you don’t have to. Wicked’s fiberglass shells get bonded with 5200 and switched over to Gemlux composite fittings (their “TruDesign” composite line) to eliminate the bronze-to-saltwater interface that historically ate fittings from the inside out. Wicked pressure-tests every box in-shop at 25–35 PSI — overkill for normal operation, but the boxes are connected to holes in the bottom of a boat that may be running 50 to 60 knots, so overkill is the design intent.

The longevity claim has a number behind it now too: Wicked has formally announced an industry-first 100-year warranty on its fiberglass pump boxes through its Certified Service Program. Alex frames it the way a manufacturer can only frame it when they believe the shell isn’t the failure point: switch out the pumps as needed, the box outlasts the boat.

Builder Partnerships

The other through-line in this episode is Wicked moving from aftermarket retrofit to OEM spec on serious offshore center consoles. Year three of the new ownership, Alex says, the build-side conversation has clicked. Pump boxes are currently spec’d or in-flight at:

• Freeman 32 — one of the first OEM placements; Wicked replaced a metal box that Freeman’s engineering team had been having intermittent issues with.
• Front Runner — ramping to roughly 10–12 boxes a month across two models.
• Solus 42, with the Solus 40 expected to follow.
• Queen Custom 52 center console, with a Queen 28 coming.
• Southport — pump-box placements live.

That isn’t a side door for an aftermarket company; it’s builders specifying a fiberglass pump box because the engineers agree the metal version creates a corrosion problem they don’t want to own warranty calls on. The trend is independently corroborated — a Wicked release covering four premier offshore builders detailed the same OEM ramp.

Alex also flagged a forthcoming pump-box-plus-manifold combo and Wicked’s own manifold design — both aimed at simplifying the plumbing decisions that builders and rigging shops have been making piecemeal.

Walker’s Cay & Lights Out

The episode was recorded on the way to Walker’s Cay for the Lights Out crew’s next start. Mark and Alex are deadheading over together; Wicked’s wells were on the boat that Lights Out Boston Anglers Club ran when they took the season opener — the 2026 SFC Key West Classic in April, the league’s first Citizen Trophy of the Atlantic Division (SFC week-1 recap). Alex calls that one a “full-circle moment” — the boat had Wicked wells and bait tubes on it the day they put together six sailfish across five anglers and won.

The Bahamas itself is the field context Wicked talks about constantly. Walker’s Cay is — in Mark’s words on the show — a fisherman’s paradise where you can deep-drop snapper and grouper in the morning, dive hogfish and grouper in the afternoon, and troll blue marlin, white marlin, and sailfish on the same edge by evening. The fishing this run is on: a Forte-1 boat had two blue marlin on the leader by 10 a.m. the morning the episode was recorded.

That’s the actual end of the supply chain Wicked sells into. The livewell isn’t the point; what the livewell makes possible on a Bahamas billfish day is.

Key Takeaways

• Pressurization beats slosh on rough days. A pressurized well with a gutter system and a controllable drain valve keeps bait swimming through the kind of conditions sailfish actually bite in.
• Bait economics decide tournaments. $150-a-dozen goggle-eyes plus pre-fishing days plus a tournament buy-in mean the variable that pays the well off is “did the bait survive the ride.”
• Metal in the bilge is the failure mode. Pump boxes corrode from underneath; the failure can be invisible until you have a bilge full of water 70 miles offshore.
• Fiberglass + composite fittings = no rust path. Wicked’s switch to Gemlux composite fittings and a fiberglass shell removes the bronze-to-saltwater interface, and the 100-year warranty is now formally announced.
• OEM is where this goes. Freeman 32, Front Runner, Solus 42, Queen Custom 52, and Southport are all running Wicked pump boxes as factory spec.
• Plumb the relief, not just the pickup. A high-speed pickup paired with a low-speed pickup that doubles as a relief — plus a check-valve breather on the lid — keeps the box pressurized without over-pressurizing.

Notable Quotes

• Alex Plick on the design problem Scotty Alvarez set out to solve: “Scotty Alvarez started the company in 2010 and he saw these live wells where, hey, we can either pressurize them, water is going to start leaking out everywhere, or we don’t have them pressurized to get the slosh effect, and then you’re running out in rough waters, those baits are getting beat up and killed.”
• Alex Plick on sailfish-tournament conditions: “We pray for rough days on these sailfish tournaments.”
• Alex Plick paraphrasing JC Cleary of Remix: “The difference between a winning team and a team that’s just falling short couldn’t be the bait.” (Alex’s recollection of JC’s line, not a direct JC quote.)
• Alex Plick on serious-tournament discipline: “If you’re going to be serious about it … you don’t want to stop at the last part right before you’re dipping that bait.”
• Alex Plick on early box installs still in service: “Scotty put like six or seven boxes in 2011 to some boats in Ocean Reef and some others up in Palm Beach that are still using that same box today.”
• Alex Plick recounting the Dominican Republic safety story: “He starts getting a high water alarm. … Everything is filled with water. Basically, he was rusting out from under the bottom. He had no idea.”
• Alex Plick on the bilge philosophy: “There’s just no reason for metal to be in the bilge.”
• Mark Farag closing out: “If you don’t have Wicked Wells on your boat, I don’t know what you’re doing.”

Closing the Loop

The throughline of the conversation is hard to miss: every part of an offshore tournament day comes down to the bait that’s still swimming when you put it on a leader. Pressurized livewells, fiberglass pump boxes, the right composite fittings, the right plumbing — these aren’t cockpit aesthetics. They’re the difference between a boat that’s set up to win and a boat that’s set up to almost win.

If you’re building, refitting, or just thinking about what your livewell setup actually costs you in dead bait per season, this is the episode to listen to all the way through.

Watch the full episode of The Science of Fishing with Alex Plick on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=G_6SNh9lXN0