I've practiced a lot with my castnet but can still only throw tacos. It didn't matter at Fairfield, I caught all the shad and talapia I could handle. Hasn't worked well on the rivers though. I'll check out those videos when I get to a better computer. I'm heading to a river soon and want to fish with live shad.

I really only fish with bait when I'm at the coast, so I'm no expert, but I do have one of those ez throw ring ones. I have actually managed to get it to open up pretty good while sitting on a few occasions. I still think in warm weather you're better off getting outta the yak, but if I could stand like yota or lusca I'd probably do it more. Looks cool.

The way I do it on the coast in summer is tie the yak to my wading belt so it follows me around, then I walk the sand bars, between ankle and waist deep, throwing when I see bait and opening the net into my yak and use it as a work table to get the mullet into my bait bucket. So I dont really stay on land but at SLP you can wade very far away and its nice to not have to walk back to shore to dump your catch to put it into your bait bucket. As for coastal cast netting in winter, it seems pretty hit or miss. I just go to the middle of channels and toss the net from a sitting position, I get fully open nets most the time but only a couple feet from the yak, let it sink to the bottom then seem what I caught. Dont always get bait this way though so during the winter I always get a pound of dead mullet (about $3) and sometimes a bag of frozen peeled shrimp (about $5 lasts a few trips) for catching whiting and croakers for live bait. As for freshwater, Ive only tried to castnet once and all I caught was branches. So I busted out some size 16 panfish hooks (TINY) and used small pieces of a hotdog to catch perch just bigger than a quarter, seemed like great bait but didnt have any luck with them, so went a bought minnows ($2 a dozen at the place I went to, way better than croakers at bait shops down here, like $10 a dozen)