Tackle Challenged

Adding to a collection that never stops growing.

In the wake of ICAST, the annual fishing-tackle trade show that’s held every year in July, we’ve been fairly overwhelmed by a load of great new stuff. Materials get more sophisticated and more durable. Designs of lures, rods and reels increasingly reflect the particular demands of a growing number of anglers. More interesting, a lot of gear has been developed for specific purposes. Gone are the days of making due or adapting existing tackle. If you have a preference or a specialty, there’s probably a mission-specific rod, reel, line and a parade of lures that fit the bill.

I’m going to have to find some room in my tackle closet. I’ve deliberately confined my tackle to a single closet. Granted, it’s a pretty big closet.

But it doesn’t have any windows, so technically, it’s still a closet. It keeps everything contained, organized and easy to find. Well, most of the time.

At least everything is in one place. Except for some rods that wouldn’t quite fit that I put in another room. And a backup supply of line, and some boxes of lures that fit tidily—well, they fit anyway—into a couple of sets of bookshelves. And some tackle bags, some of which have stayed packed for the next trip to the Bahamas, or a day of jigging for tuna.

A routine, on a rolling schedule, of straightening and organizing the gear in that closet always turns up a few things I didn’t remember I had. It’s like going shopping all over again. Sometimes I find things I may have bought at one time and forgot about. Or misplaced, and then replaced.

Usually, I find some surprises when prepping for a trip that requires tackle for a specific type of fishing. Sometimes what I’m looking for hasn’t even been unpacked and stored since I last used it.

With our travel curtailed as of late, there are some things I haven’t seen for a while, as the more-oft-used items filter to the front of the shelves, leaving just a hint of the rediscovery awaiting in the depths, which is as it should be. Who in their right mind would ever get rid of fishing tackle?

Even when a new or improved version of something comes along, the original makes a good backup, or as a loaner—but get rid of it? Get serious.

I admire the discipline of anglers who are so well-organized and inventoried, at least mentally, that their storage rooms—or closets—resemble a museum, or an informal retail establishment. They seem to know just where everything is, and how much of everything they have, down to the last hook. At least that’s the public face they present.

I suspect they’ve rented an off-site storage space and have little idea what’s really in there.