Covid-19 Update

As a result of impacts to our business due to Covid-19, we regretfully had to shelve the GoFish Bounty Fishing Program in the summer of 2021.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the past. It is our dream to bring back the bounty program very soon once we have the resources to support it.

Hunter Strimple - GoFish Bounty Program Administrator

About the Bounty Program

We wanted to give people a reason to take a long lunch during work and go fishing in their nearby lake. We thought it would be really cool and fun to create a worldwide fishing “treasure hunt”. We would hide “treasure” in bodies of water around the world and give prizes to the anglers who found them. After thinking about it, we quickly realized that the logistics of pulling that off were nearly impossible. The idea started to evolve into something a little more realistic. 

We were inspired by a contest that was offered by Hale Lures / Stanley Jigs in 2019. They offered a $100,000 prize for anyone who caught a world record largemouth bass using their products. We realized we could do something similar, but make our contest more accessible to more people. It doesn’t have to be a world record to be an interesting catch. We would offer cash bounties for catches that we specified and that everyday anglers could compete for using our cameras. As we brainstormed, we realized that we had some big problems to solve. How could we possibly afford to spend money to offer bounties to anglers? We were just getting our business off the ground and cash was very tight. On top of that, how could we stop people from cheating? We didn’t have the resources to verify each catch in person. 

Traditionally, fishing tournaments have to be localized to a single location because immediate verification of catches is needed to eliminate cheating. However, we have something nobody else has: an underwater camera that can capture video evidence of the strike and entire fight to land a fish. We realized we could use our technology to verify catches remotely. We would post bounties on our bounty hunters website and people would compete to win real money by submitting video evidence of their catches. In order to capture valid video, anglers would need to purchase an underwater fishing camera and use the GoFish Cam app. It was a win-win scenario; Our bounties would give anglers an exciting reason to go fishing while simultaneously creating a marketing opportunity to sell cameras. Those sales would provide the funds we needed to offer more bounties in the future.

And thus, the GoFish Bounty Program was born. We wanted to make sure that everyone could enjoy the fishing program, so we worked hard to design a variety of bounty categories that offered prizes based on difficulty. For example, you could win a modest “Bingo Bounty” by catching all the species that live in your local waterway. Or, you could enter to win the “ Bounty of The Month”, where each fish caught counted as one entry in our monthly cash raffle. For more experienced anglers, we offered a “Legendary Bounty” to reward ultra-rare catches. For the most hardcore anglers, we created “Flash Bounties”, where the first angler to catch a specific species in a specific (often remote) location would win a big prize.

It took some time, but we scrimped and scraped together enough money to publish our first season of bounties on a dedicated website. We created a special “Tournament Mode” on our app to create the verified video evidence we needed. “Tournament Mode” puts the camera in continuous recording mode on the highest quality setting. It also embeds data into the video that tracks the time and GPS coordinates of the catch to verify that the catch was made at the right place and at the right time. We offered our first bounty in the fall of 2019.