From Waters to Wallets: How to Make Money Fishing

We keep doing our hobbies for fun, but making money off of them on the side is a pretty huge bonus.

The same principle applies to fishing. Of course, starting a fishing business will get you the most money, but not everyone has the means to do that. So if you’re a hobbyist who wants to get paid for fishing, you’ve come to the right place… or, website.

Competing and Content Creation

These are probably two of the most difficult ways to make bucks out of fishing, but boy, do they pay well. The Major League Fishing (MLF) Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit, for example, gives prizes as high as $135,000, and another one of its competitions, the Toyota Series, gives almost double the amount of money at $235,000. Hell, if you’re a young angler, they even have competitions for high school and college students. But if you’re more or less a pro bass fisherman, then the National Professional Fishing League (NPFL) might be your cup of tea.

These prizes are small compared to what the Sport Fishing Championship (SFC) offered in early 2022, though: a staggering million dollars in cryptocurrency in the Billfish Division. I could go on, but you get the point.

Then there’s content creation, which covers a lot of things. YouTube or TikTok videos, Instagram reels, blog posts, and many others—they all encompass “content” on the internet. According to HubSpot, the average salary for content creators as of 2022 is $44,192 annually, which is around $22 per hour. Better pay than some jobs, right? And it can be pursued by creating content about fishing adventures and the like, which a lot of us already have.

Products and Services

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Selling products and services to other fishermen is also another way to make money fishing.

With experience, we anglers get a better feel of what lures work in certain times and situations. Lures can be bought in stores, or made at home. If you’ve found that your homemade lures work pretty well, you can mass produce them and sell them for profit. You can start by offering them to other fishing buddies, and eventually, on the internet. There are many options when it comes to where you can sell them.

As for services, there are a bunch of things you can offer fellow fishermen. As Wesley Stoudt of Money Mozart lists down, you can either offer fishing tour guide services or give others fishing lessons. They could get you some good pocket money if you (a) know a lot of fishing spots extremely well or (b) have a good amount of experience fishing and are generally trusted in the fishing community.

Fish Clearing and Breeding

Predatory fish can sometimes swarm bodies of water. If there are too many of them, they will end up eating plenty of the other species in them, and will therefore have to be cleared. People are willing to pay others to clean up these waters for them, and if you’re up for the task, you can earn a good sum of money.

Around 30% of those predatory fish will likely remain, though, so while they’re there, people will be in need of such services.

As for breeding, you can either breed edible or tropical fish and sell them in markets or to aquarium owners. Know which species are in your area and see what you can do!

Overall, there are many ways to make money fishing. But it depends on how much you’re willing to invest in them. Still, if it ends up getting you some bucks, they might be worth your while.