How to organize your fishing tackle

One of the last things you should be doing when it’s time to go fishing is wasting precious minutes organizing your tacklebox. Follow these eight handy tips and you’ll not only have more room for your tackle, you’ll also be ready to hit the water at a moment’s notice.

1. Tackleboxes are great, but they don’t offer much flexibility in terms of accommodating different sizes and types of lures. Tackle bags with removable plastic utility boxes, however, offer much more room—and versatility.
2. Dedicate one or two compartmentalized utility boxes for each species of fish you generally go after. Fill as many as you need, but when you head out, just bring the boxes for the species you’ll be targeting that day.
3. Spinnerbaits can take up a lot of room in utility boxes; save space by placing them instead in specialized pouches, such as Tackle Logic’s Spinner Wraps, which resemble sandwich bags. These pouches will also fit well into the external pockets of your tackle bag.
4. Also use specialized bags to organize and store your soft-plastic baits. Again, these will fit nicely in your tackle bag’s external pockets.
5. Utility boxes come with plastic dividers that fit into fixed slots to create separate compartments for different lures. You can customize your own compartment sizes, however, by using clear hockey tape to secure the dividers in place wherever you want.
6. You can also use empty, clear-plastic film containers as dividers; just trim them down so they’re the same depth as the utility box. The containers not only separate lures, but also serve as storage containers for small items such as splitshot.
7. You can often fit more than one lure into a single compartment, but the hooks tend to get jumbled. To help avoid this, and to fit in even more lures, use elastic bands to secure the hooks tight against the lure bodies.
8. Buy two or three smaller utility boxes to accommodate all your terminal tackle. You can store these boxes in your bag’s external pockets.