Tackle Box Reorganization...

As a retired guy I mostly piddle around each day in a viscous unrelenting cycle of tuba playing, grand kids and fishing. I guess I am easily amused because when I finish the cycle, I start it over again and I have found that I usually find something new each cycle so maybe these are deep subjects with many meanings, shadings and analogies of life that hopefully I have enough time left to get to the bottom of. I took the time this past week to rearrange all the tackle boxes. 

I rarely buy a new lures so it's not like the collection of fishing lures are growing but I do restock the easily consumable and hangable things like hooks, weights, panfish jig heads and plastic lures. I had come to a system of stackable flat boxes that I kept in the boat compartments and switched out into a little tool bag satchel that I stocked with the appropriate gear then carried in the canoe, to the beach or wherever the trip took me. I used two old big tackle boxes to reduce the flat boxes by 4 or 5 so this is a more compact assortment than before. Many of the lures pictured here I bought as a teen or young adult, were my dad's or in the case of the big silver box gifted me from a life time collection by friends Suzi and Charley when they went through some recent downsizing.         

This is the box that gets the most use, the catfish or just general bait fishing gear. There's hooks, weights and slip corks. 

My dad's old tackle box. I cleaned this out by sorting the various lures into other specialized boxes and filled this with the content of the three flat boxes that held most of my saltwater tackle. There's one box left that is saltwater plastic tails so this reduces from about four boxes that I usually carried in a big boy scout backpack to two boxes. Sometimes I only saltwater fish once or twice a year but with the recent generator purchase for the RPod camper we hope to make use of the free camping on Texas beaches this summer.    

Top box here are Rapalas (some of my dad's favorite lures) and small crank baits. Bottom box is the saltwater jig tails. 

Yellow box is a Charlie Brewer Slider kit of bass sized lures. I like the slider worms and probably catch more bass on the panfish sizes than I do on these. On top of that is the rattle trap box. A rattle trap is a good bait, fresh or salt. It's an idiot bait. Any idiot throw it out and reel it in is gonna catch fish. 

Here's a couple of boxes of plastic worms the bottom one I found floating in the lake. The day I found it I posted on the Sam Rayburn Fishing report page my location if the owner was looking but no takers. Top box is old Hellbenders and deep diving crank baits. I don't know how many times as a kid I caught a big bass out the back of the boat on a Hellbender while the old man was trying to crappie fish.  

Cranks, top waters and spinner baits. Some probably a good 40 years old from the dawn of the golden age of mass produced lures.  

The old box Suzi and Charlie gave me. I combined these lures, sone from the collections of their parents with my dad's stuff from his box to make a general bass fishing box of cranks, old Devil's Horse top waters, chuggers and idiot baits. If some modern bass fisherman invites me I'll take this and maybe throw in a flat box of the plastic worms. . 

I labeled the boxes and so far if I have used a lure I return it to the right box. I guess all this will work time I cycle around and start piddling again. In my dad's old box there were at least 10 deep diving magnum Redfins that we used to catch the hybrids out of Rayburn on in the early 80s and I have a stash of them somewhere. It's a cycle that may never be finished.