This year at IBEX, one thing became obvious — the industry is growing fast and it is ready to move beyond using metal boxes and patchwork raw-water systems that drive warranty issues and hold back scale.
To that end, after hundreds of downloads of our corrosion whitepaper and dozens of conversations on the dock and in the aisles, three themes came up so much that we thought it was worth putting them down on paper for everyone to benefit from:
Here’s a clean breakdown — written exactly the way we design: direct, field-informed, and ready for builders and captains who care about performance when it counts.
This was one of the most repeated notions we heard at IBEX from anyone who read or heard about the whitepaper:
“If my bait isn’t dying, is corrosion really costing me anything?”
Here’s the straight answer: corrosion doesn’t start as a hardware failure — it starts as a water quality shift at the chemistry level. When metal components begin to fatigue, they release trace ions (nickel, zinc, copper) into the flow. You won’t always see it, but your bait will feel it.
These ions irritate gill tissue and stress the slime coat, leading to reduced oxygen assimilation. The bait doesn’t die — it just stops flashing, slows its cadence, loses instinctive schooling tension. On paper, it’s alive. In practice, it’s no longer tournament bait.
Fiberglass is chemically inert. It adds nothing to the water column, removes galvanic variables, and preserves the water exactly as it enters the system — clean, unreactive, and high-oxygen.
Put simply: Metal competes with your bait. Fiberglass doesn’t.
If you haven't read it yet, we dive into this in even more depth in the whitepaper.
Livewell performance isn’t about meeting a minimum spec — it’s about matching what winning captains run to keep bait firing all day.
Across years of watching top tournament setups, we’ve seen a consistent trend:
The boats that never lose bait cadence are pushing around 30× total system turnover per hour.
Example:
Two 28-gallon Sailfisher style round wells ≈ 158 gallons total water volume. 158 × 30 = 4,740 GPH flow required to keep bait oxygenated under load — not just alive, but sharp.
Using Rule 2000 GPH pumps as the reference standard, you’d need 3 pumps to hit that flow. But that just covers ideal conditions. Serious captains build in N+1 redundancy, because pumps fail — usually at the worst time.
That puts you in a 4-pump Gamechanger box for a real tournament-ready spec.
Patterns We See Across the Most Reliable Builds:
Our 100-Year Warranty was reverse-engineered from what actually fails in marine raw-water systems and at IBEX we fielded a lot of questions about what is covered versus not.
Truth from the field: Pumps burn out, fittings swell and get swapped, hoses fatigue and get re-run. Those are service parts — like most other hard-running parts on a boat, they’re meant to be replaced. The enclosures aren't. We designed the certified service program around those facts.
Bottom line: Performance matters - so every 3 years, we re-tune your system back to original spec — not because fiberglass needs help, but because performance should age like running gear, not hardware.
This year felt like a shift — not just in product interest, but in how builders and captains are thinking about raw-water systems as critical performance infrastructure, not commodity hardware.
If you left IBEX with questions — or you’re already sketching a new system layout — send it. We’re happy to look at real setups, not theoretical ones.