Turns Out I'm Not Crazy After All

Photo by Dave Wolak

...Or if I am, then there are at least two of us in the same boat.

You see, ever since I began this fishing-lure purge, I've been looking around online to see if there are any others doing the same thing. And just as I was about ready to give up, I happened onto the story (Forget the Winter Clean Up. Just Sell Your Old Lures, Field & Stream, Jan. 23, 2017) about a pro angler who routinely purges his fishing arsenal. His name is Dave Wolak. Instead of trying to reorganize all his lures every winter, he just turns them into cash.

"Each and every year," said Wolak, "many of us resolve to commit to the arduous task of cleaning our tackle, organizing strewn piles of plastics from the previous season, and/or applying new hooks and split rings to piles of hard baits, only to redistribute these baits to the 90 tackle boxes filled with lures that get used .01 percent of our bass-fishing time... . To be honest, I don't even try to execute this massive yearly cleanup anymore. If you bass fish a lot, it's nearly impossible to keep up with all the byproducts of multiple days on the water, multiple non-effective lure purchases, and obsessive organization while trying to find exactly what may work best for the next time you hit the water."

"If you're familiar with this scenario," Wolak continued, "you often end up with pods of used, obscure lures that somehow fail to get put away correctly. A solid one-third of these baits are one-time tries that likely will never see the water again. A good part of the other two-thirds of the pile can be rendered unusable (by an OCD fisherman like me) until new hooks are put on and they get a cleaning... . The bottom line is that you don't want to make one mistake turn into several mistakes comprised of inefficient time, space and money. So my advice is to get rid of them AS IS and hopefully get a little cash in return."

After all, there's more truth than fiction to that old saying, "One man's junk is another man's treasure." It's amazing that the mistake you made by buying a lure to catch bass in Lake ABC can become the best decision a guy ever made to catch fish in Lake XYZ. The global market opens up a whole world to fishing equipment, no pun intended.

Wolak advises finding someone with a business selling stuff on eBay (preferably fishing stuff) and letting them do it for you in exchange for a percentage of the sales (making sure you know what that percentage is). Simply tell them, "I want to hand you a giant pile of fishing stuff. You arrange it for sale on eBay and send me a check when it's gone."