Have you ever gone fishing with a buddy who, when he changes lures, opens his tackle box and can’t seem to find what he’s looking for, even after several minutes? I have and it occurred to me after my last fishing trip with this one friend of mine that his tackle box is probably the only thing that he owns that he isn’t absolutely anal about keeping clean and organized.
His truck is 5 years old and looks cleaner than the day he drove off the lot, inside and out. His tool boxes are arranged in such a way that he doesn’t even have to look to find what he needs because everything is in ascending order, from small to large, even his screwdrivers. Considering all this, to watch him open his tackle box and see everything spilling out, really amazes me.
I look at my tackle box as my tool box for when I’m on the water. There are several boxes, each with related items, neatly stacked inside the bag so that when I need to change a lure, I can take the old one off, put it away and grab the new one within a matter of seconds. This, in my opinion, gives me more fishing time when I’m on the water.
We were fishing and my buddy decided to change from a spinnerbait to a crank and took literally ten minutes to find the one he was looking for, tie it on and make his first cast. The trouble was that in that period of time, I managed to catch two fish as he was getting more and more frustrated with not having his line in the water. It was comical beyond belief. By the time he was ready to go, we had to change spots because the bite shut down. Even a sailor would have been proud listening to his litany as we were moving to the next spot.
About the third time he went into his box and repeated the process, I asked him why on earth his tackle box looked the way it did. He really didn’t have an answer other than he just never gets around to cleaning it. We talked about the spring cleaning that we like to do here before the season really kicks off and it is a ritual that I couldn’t live without every year.
As new baits and techniques are developed, we all have to make room for the corresponding tackle in our boxes. The question becomes, do we do it in such a way that we can get to everything quickly and efficiently? Do we look at our tackle boxes as tool boxes that contain everything we would need for a day on the water or are they just a place to store all the stuff we have acquired over the years and really rarely if ever use?
For me, the answer is simple. For one thing, my time on the water always seems to be too short. This is one mighty fine reason to know exactly what I have and where it is in my box so that if the need arises, I can get to it in a hurry and get down to the business of fishing.
Another consideration is do you have everything you need to accommodate the changing conditions that you might encounter on the water? Can you cover the water column from top to bottom with what is in your box? Do you have the tools needed to “match the hatch” depending on what the fish tell you they want?
A case in point is a couple of weeks ago when we went to a lake where we found the bass were all keying in on fingerlings. These fish would refuse anything that wasn’t very close to the same size as what they were feeding on. My solution was to get out the Spro Phat Fly and go to work. We have reviewed these little doll hair jigs and they were the key to having a good day that day.
It takes time to set up a versatile tackle box with all the lures and terminal tackle that you might need. However, as you’re going through this process, it may help to think about your tackle box as a tool box. Everything in there should serve a purpose for a technique that you may have to utilize when you’re on the water. Arrange things neatly so that you know what you have to cover the entire water column and the size range of lures that the fish may be focusing on. Like most collections of tools, they’re much easier to use when they are orderly.
See ya’ on the water …