Consider This If You're Looking for a Safer Way to Store Baits With Treble Hooks

Some anglers subscribe to the idea that bigger and/or more is always better, but there are those who see things differently, especially when it comes to storing baits with treble hooks in plastic tackleboxes in their boats. After all, who doesn't get tired of trying to grab one particular bait with treble hooks attached, only to have six or seven more snagged onto it, with treble hooks glaring at you, just daring you, so to speak, to get in a hurry?

While that may be OK for some of you dudes with the "look, ma, no brains" mentality, others prefer to take a more carefully charted course to success. One of those is Jason Sealock at Wired2Fish.

Seems that Sealock watched a video a few years ago about an ice-fishing angler who stored his lipless crankbaits for ice fishing in a peanut-butter jar, using rubber bands to keep the baits from tangling. While not wanting to convert all his crankbait boxes to peanut-butter jars, Sealock started playing with how to make a similar plan work in his current tackleboxes. You see, he likes to add and/or replace boxes in his boat as the bite changes over the course of a year.

Sealock came up with a rubber-band trick of his own. He found he could store a lot of baits in smaller boxes without them getting stuck together. His idea worked equally satisfactory for bigger baits in bulk boxes as well. In addition, the new way alleviated his worry about having stuff in divided slots in tackle boxes. Now he could sort of pile various baits in together by color if he wanted, and they all stayed pretty much in place without tangling.

Heck! Sealock even could dump all his baits onto the deck of his boat, pick out the ones he wanted, and throw all the others back into the box without them getting hung on each other.

And best of all, there was only the negligible cost of a package of small rubber bands...a mere buck in the craft section at a local Walmart. "They were about the diameter of my finger and worked perfectly for looping treble hooks together," he said.

"If it's a two-hook lure," explained Sealock, "just fold back the hook under the belly, and pin it to the body, then bring the front hook back and face the treble hooks back-to-back. Finally, wind the rubber band around several times to hold the hooks together.

"For a three-hook lure, fold the first two back-to-back and wrap a couple times together, then bring the back hook under the tail and loop the rubber band onto there (see photo at left). Then all you need are some boxes to store them in. I still use tackleboxes, but I also played around with putting them into other plain storage containers."

Sealock went on to note that he keeps extra rubber bands in his boat, as well as his shop and the house.

"They will break, dry rot, and such," he said. "But so far, I usually can store them this way for months.

"I was getting some jerkbaits out the other day, and one band had broken, allowing that bait to get stuck on everything nearby. The other baits, though, all came right out with no problem. That example solidified for me how effective my way of storage is...for jerkbaits, crankbaits and topwaters. I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to take out the lure I want without having to shake everything else loose for 5 minutes every time I want to swap colors, sounds or size of my treble-hooked lures," he concluded.