Ramble with Storm: Yard sales & tackle

Mulling things on my morning ramble

with Storm, the family’s mixed Lab.

I hate yard sales.

And garage sales.

For that matter, any combination of the two.

Probably goes back to my wife finding bargains at yard and garage sales.

Then lugging them home, where they added more clutter to a house, garage and yard already too cluttered with the stuff of a family of six.

Then again.

Our town garage sale has been a Godsend for me.

For years, I refused to join.

Then my wife forced me, kicking and screaming as usual in these cases, to plunk down the $10 to get on the map of the town yard sales.

And it forced me to go through my fishing tackle.

That’s no small feat.

I’m like most guys. When it comes to fishing stuff, I collect it. More than half of it is crap I will never use.

Truly, I usually only use a handful of specific crankbaits, a few topwaters, some basic jigs and twisters and a bit of an assortment of soft baits like Senkos and plastic worms.

The rest of the crap just sits in tackle boxes or my fishing and hunting corner of the basement. And collects basement crud on it.

Well, I decided three years ago to go through my tackle. The stuff I never used would go out for the yard sale.

Boom, it went like that. And I am talking about simple stuff like small bags of goofy-colored plastics, which I boiught for some dumb reason and never used.

It wasn’t a matter of getting rich.

There are people who cruise the yard and garage sale scene in hopes of finding that obscure lure. That’s not my aim.

What mattered to be was the yard sale turned into a good reason to thin and consolidate my tackle.

That’s valuable.

The trick is not wandering around town and finding some other guy cleaning out his tackle. And finding something I have to try.