The Tackle Box

The tackle box is essential to fishing and Spring is the prime time to organize. This can be a very daunting task. What’s important to your fishing? What’s important to your life? You’ve got some old lures, some that have been successful and some you’ve never used. It’s good to try to organize but not too critical. One of the most important goals is to keep things separated. Hooks, for example, which can scatter all over the box. Collect them, then separate them according to size and put each pile on a safety pin. You may not find the right size hook but if you do you’ll have all at your finger tips. At least you can find a similar size and have a good supply of each.

The bottom of the box is probably going to be harder if you’re like me. The space is never big enough. The size never changes but the stuff going in keeps getting bigger. When the box won’t close it’s time to reorder, I mean reorganize. First take it all out and then separate as best you can by order of importance, most used, highest potential to be used, never used but most liked or any other reason that would pertain to you. Try to get the piles down to a size that fits in a baggie. Arrange the baggies for importance and start to fill the bottom again. Once full keep the extra bags and store them in the plastic shopping bag you stored the extra bags in the last 10 years.

You’ll also have equipment that is essential to any fishing outing such as a fillet knife, a knife for emergencies (working on the boat or motor), a knife for cutting line (fishing and anchor), fingernail clippers for fishing line only, sun glasses, a lighter, antacid tabs, aspirin, prep H, sunscreen, duct tape and a candy bar. When all free space in the lure trays is full you will need to take some bags out from the bottom. Remember the least important bags come out first and put these in the plastic shopping bag.

Eventually you’ll get to a point that the bag of new gear fresh from the store, or catalog order, is bigger than the bags in the plastic shopping bag. This is a prime opportunity to purchase a new tackle box. Try to find the best bang for your buck in the largest size you can find. Now you’ll be able to organize the tackle boxes with certain subjects in mind. These could include general fishing, walleye, trout, shore fishing, trolling, lake or river, lure types and for me a kids fishing box for my grand-daughters. Each box has its own set of rules to consider for the importance of the gear. My problem now is it’s harder for me to remember which box is which. All the boxes are different sizes and shapes so I can usually associate each to their type of use. I have magic markered references on some, but not all. Some of the new boxes are more like bags and they’re black so duct tape is used to put the references on.

Now the problem is knowing which box/bag to take. Depending who I’m fishing with I may have 4 or 5 of the things. If I ever went fishing with my buddy Hankie on Lake Erie I would take 5 box/bag combos. The walleye box, the trolling bag, the bottom bounce bag, the plastic bodies bag and the general box. We were targeting walleye but switching techniques was always a consideration depending on the weather. Sometimes we caught waldos but as often as not the trip turned into a sheephead outing. Those fish are really fun to catch. Good luck to you on your spring organizing.