Is this brilliant or am I missing something?

Wet fish holds for live fish is a concept hundreds of years old, and is basically the same...i.e. a free flooding space with holes through the hull. Typically used for fisheries where the fish are not critically injured by the catch method.

Eels to England https://www.woodenboat.com/eels-england

 

Many of the older live wells I’ve seen have fewer but relatively large flow holes, tennis ball size, so that they can be sealed off with same.
For some reason, small baits don’t swim out the holes, though they obviously could.

 

Hi Geno67. If your fishing grounds suffer from sea lice and / or other small parasites and predators, your live bait, or your catch will be eaten alive while captive in the well. Finding half eaten fish carcasses on a morning isn't nice, and the fish don't like it either. Sea lice are more active at night it seems. A separate tank and pumped water is safer, and no energy sapping holes in the hull. Wet wells are probably efficient in slow moving sailing fishing boats, with free wind power, and displacement hulls anyway. Bottom flow disruption and tank water cycling would make a less efficient motorised hull.

 

Neat idea, but obviously not for all boats or waters. Here, our baits would die in a cooking tank..

 

The water flows in and out freely. I couldn't see how the temperature could be more than a degree or two off the surrounding water temp.

As for parasites, it's a trailer sailor and is never in the water more than a day or two. Basically all my fishing is live well or freshly killed cut bait fishing. My current setup is two tanks with pumps that fail every year no matter how expensive and wiring that fails every couple of decades no matter how expensive. I have live shrimp in one and pogies/blue runners/moonfish and about half of what I catch on the shrimp in the other for sure enough fish. I target hogfish (live shrimp and lots of shrimp chum), tuna (10-12" live baits) and grouper (live or flayed 1-3 lb. baits) and occasionally catch one of everything incidentally.

 

It probably is not a standard to leaking into the bilge and because the waterline in many boats is only a few inches.

Otherwise, it is a great idea.

 

Leaking is the only thing that really worries me. I was planning to seal the entire area under the sole and omit the standard bilge pumps. I will have a portable bilge pump that will reach the entire boat. How hard is it to seal the area under the sole to act as flotation?

 

Aluminum boats, well skiffs, use buoyancy foam, ftmp.