Fishermen, especially bass fishermen, can never have enough equipment. Anytime anything new hits the market, we buy it.  If we don’t have a bait a professional fisherman uses to win a big tournament, you can bet that bait will soon be in our tackle box.   

Walk into Berrys Sporting Goods and you will be dazzled by the colors and variety of bass baits. Crankbaits look like little fish but come in colors Mother Nature never dreamed possible.  Spinnerbaits look like wire contraptions with spinners on one arm, lead head and skirt on the other and do not look like anything in nature.  And many baits look like nothing on earth.   

My “tackle box” is a 20-foot bass boat with six storage compartments, several of them big enough for me to get inside and close the lid. And they are all full of rods and lures.  

  Every few years I try to simplify my fishing, taking rods, lures and worms that I have not used in a couple of years out of the boat.  Boxes of those unused lures line my garage wall after a purge, but somehow seem to make their way back into the boat over the next few months, just in case I want to try them.    

Preparing for a tournament, I usually rig about 21 rods with baits.  Up front on one side of the casting platform I have seven rigged with baits I plan to use, based on time of year we are fishing. On the other side I have seven more rigged with baits I might use.  On the back, if I do not have a partner, I have seven more just-in-case baits.   

In a typical tournament I use four or five of the ones I plan on using, usually during the first hour.  Then I settle down and stick with one or two, usually a jig and a shaky head.  Normally I never pick up any of the other rods I have ready.   

I’m trying to simplify again. I basically have two color worms I use on my shaky head, and I have a dozen 20 packs of each color so I won’t run out. I am taking out the 30 two-gallon zip loc bags filled with colors I have not used in the past year.   

With the jig and pig, I again use two colors of jigs and two colors of matching trailers.  I don’t need the 25 other colors of both!   

There are crankbaits in my boat I bought back in the 1970s and have been moved from boat to boat nine times, but probably not tied on a line in 40 years.  The two-gallon bags of “spare” spinnerbaits have been unused so long their skirts are gummy and hooks are rusty.  No point in carrying them.  

  Even after I finish getting rid of all the unnecessary junk, my boat will still be full. And no doubt things will somehow move back in to my boat during the year, never used and purged again at some future date.