Quote Originally Posted by stripernut View Post
i carry a piece of wax paper and a permanent magic marker in the boat. when you catch a biggun put it in the livewell immediately, get the wax paper out and lay it flat and get the magic marker ready and the camera ready and position the boat so the sun is at the optimum angle to capture the truest colors of the fish.
take the fish out of the livewell and let it "drip dry" for a few seconds, lay the fish on the wax paper and draw the outline of the fish with the magic marker. take several quick pics and return the fish to the livewell immediately. inspect the pics to make sure they represent the fish's colors, if you are satisfied with the pics you can return the fish to the water having done all of the above mentioned without the fish being out of the water for very long at all.
you now have the length and the height of the fish from the back to the belly that a taxidermist can use to determine the girth of the fish as well as quality color photos for him/her to reproduce the fishs colors.
i recently had a smallmouth replica made doing this ad it was amazing. my daughter has a trophy piece of waxpaper at the taxidermists right now.

congrats on your catch by the way

Thanks for that bit of info. I know the livewell on my boat is very good and I had that bass in there for about 2 hours thinking very hard about weather or not to keep it. I ended up keeping it. If you dont mind me asking where do you take or send your trophy wax paper? Thanks again!!