I'm not sure if this will actually help anyone or not, but I thought I'd share a few things I've learned over the last few years about organizing fishing takle from the perspective of a non-boater.
When first starting tournaments as a non-boater, I researched as many articles I could find about organizing tackle. Some of them seemed helpful at first, but I found that most of them are geared toward boaters. This makes sense, of course, since they have a boat literally full of lures, plastics, and other assorted tackle to have to keep organized. But almost that entire boat is available for storing that much tackle. With the design of the modern bass boat, you can have five full size boxes of crankbaits, two or three boxes of spinnerbaits, eight or nine boxes of jigs and worms, and so on..
But when you're a non-boater, you simply do not have have the luxury of much square footage to work with. You not only have a tiny bit of room available, but you need quick and easy access to all of it. And it has to be as unobtrusive as possible for you and your boater. But at the same time, you need to be prepared for absolutely any style of fishing that may be thrown your way. You're not necessarily always going to know what kind of fishing you're going to be doing at any given minute of a tournament and you'd better be prepared for the unexpected to come up.
Those well-laid plans for beating the bank may change completely when they open the dam to generate power, the wind starts blowing 40mph, turning your clear water bay into chocolate milk, or a storm comes in and your planned ledge fishing suddenly turns into a run up the river to get out of the wind and elements.
So what does a non-boater really need for keeping tackle organized?
I originally thought it would be a good idea to have one single, large-size bag that holds absolutely everything. So I purchased one of those Bass Pro Shops tackle bags which holds six 3700 boxes and has big pockets on each side, plus a big front pocket.
Big mistake.
On the plus side, it holds a ton of tackle.
On the negative side, it holds a TON of tackle.
Soft plastics are heavy. Really heavy. Add crankbaits, chatterbaits, jigs, senkos, buzzbaits, swimbaits, drop shot weights, hooks, and all the other terminal tackle, and that adds up to a massive load of stuff all packed into one container.
It's heavy enough that just picking up the bag and putting it in the boat can be a struggle. No big deal if the boat is tied to the dock and you can just step in. But often the boat is going to be parked on shore, leaving you access to only the bow, where your boater has a dozen or so expensive poles strapped down to the deck.
If you don't feel like wading into the water and soaking your shoes and pants, there's not much room for hefting that bag past the trolling motor and onto the deck without landing it on one or two of your boater's poles. If you want to ruin your and your boater's day before it's even started, breaking one of his eyelets before takeoff is a great way to do it.
The other problem is the expanded size of those large bags when the side pockets are full. Often (but not always) your boater will have one of the rear compartments empty for a non-boater to store a tackle bag, rain gear, drinks, etc. If they do, make good use of it.
Unfortunately, the large bag almost never fits into one of those compartments unless the side and front pockets are completely empty, which they never are. And it would defeat the whole purpose of having them if they were.
To make matters worse, you're going to need access to certain things quite often during the day, and if you have to keep opening the compartment every time you want to grab another soft plastic, you're going to waste a lot of time that could be better spent fishing.
So... after dealing with the annoyance of one annoyingly large tackle bag, I decided to change tactics.
The new, ubreakable rule is that the main tackle bag MUST be small enough to fit into the rear compartment, but still allow for easy access to its contents.
This effectively limits it to four 3700 boxes, plus one smaller box that tucks into the back/outisde of the bag.
Here are my individual boxes and their contents:
Box 1: Jigs & Punch Rigs
Includes all Craw style jigs, Bitsy Bugs and jig trailers, plus punch weights, punch skits and hooks.
Box 2: Chatterbaits, Swim Jigs, Swim Jig Heads, and various colors of Swimbaits.
So far I haven't had any problems with the swimbait tails taking a 'set' from being stored like this, but I may have to move things around if it does occur.
Possibly leaving them in bags and keeping them in the soft plastics tackle bag.
Box 3 Topwater Solid and hollowbody Frogs, Buzzbaits, Spooks, Poppers, Whopper Ploppers
Box 4: Crankbaits, Spinnerbaits, Lipless Crankbaits, Jerkbaits, Wakebaits
This is the interesting one, as I used to bring a 3700 size box filled with spinnerbaits and buzzbaits, and another 3700 box filled with crankbaits.
I rather quickly realized that I'd use one or two spinnerbaits throughout the entire day, and maybe 2 or 3 crankbaits at most. Almost all the rest of this space was completely wasted.
As a non-boater, you're not going to be going through one or two dozen crankbaits and spinnerbaits in an 8-hour tournament, so why bother bringing so many?
What I found that I needed is small, carefully-chosen selection for multiple situations, which could all fit into one single 3700 box.
- Top left is deep crankbaits, five of them in various colors
- Top right is large squarebill crankbaits, five or six colors
- Middle left is thin squarebill crankbaits, and next to it is Lipless crankbaits.
- To the right of those are smaller squarebills
- Bottom middle is filled with wakebaits, jerkbaits, and one large segmented crankbait.
The bottom left and right corners took a little bit of work to fit in some spinnerbait holders.
I sacrificed the large spinnerbait box I'd previously used, pulling out the 'rack' that holds the spinnerbaits in place.
Cutting the rack into thirds, the outside portions still contained the tabs that hold the rack in place at the sides of the box.
These tabs fit into the slots that make up the box separators, while the cut end of them (which do not have tabs) can either be left loose, or simply cement/epoxy the bottom of the rack in place.
Now those two mini-racks hold 7 white spinnerbaits and 7 colored ones. Enough to cover pretty much all situations and depths, while taking up very little room.
Box 5 is a smaller one which contains only Senkos and an O-Ring tool & nail weights. It fits neatly into a pouch on the back of the tackle bag.
With all that in the main tackle bag, that leaves a second, smaller bag which remains with me, sitting on the floor at my feet while the boat is running, and on the seat while fishing. It contains the soft plastics I use the most, separated into bags of bags with the biggest possible labels on them
Because this bag remains easily accessible, it also contains:
1) My most-needed/important small stuff for the day (Pliers, Scale, Line Clippers, Culling tags, Culling beam, Attractant, etc.)
2) A small box containing my most-used terminal tackle. I may need to get into this dozens of times a day, so it needs to be compact but organized.
3) A small box of drop shot hooks and weights. Drop shot is a co-anglers best friend. I can't stress that enough.
Does anybody else have tackle organizing tips to share?
If so, it would be interesting to see. Especially for non-boaters with limited room.
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