The next best thing

My wife and I spent last week visiting our family in the Lower 48. My father-in-law recently had an amputation of his lower left leg and has been making an incredible recovery. We helped my in-laws around the house and assisted them in any way possible. We enjoyed the sunshine on walks together as a family and plotted future fishing trips as our short outings took us along the river close to their house.

One of the projects that I helped my father-in-law with was organizing his fishing tackle. His previous situation consisted of an old plastic tackle box that wouldn’t latch and a vest pack that had seen better days. He needed something large enough to consolidate everything into one, while also keeping things organized based upon target species.

The two of us set out to Scheels one morning, me negotiating Lower 48 traffic in his big work truck and him getting in and out on crutches. Once at the store I followed him on the motorized cart to the elevator where we ascended to the best fishing selection of any major outdoor retailer I’ve yet to visit. We examined the tackle box selection together. We needed something tall and slim to fit in his boat with a large compartment to house reels and smaller fly boxes. It also needed flat tackle storage boxes for organizing hardbaits and soft plastics. We settled on one that we thought would work best and tossed it into the cart.

He and I then perused the hardbait selection to look for lures we thought would work best for trout and salmon that he liked to troll for in his local reservoirs. We then carefully dissected the discounted tackle bins finding a smattering of cheap soft plastics and crankbaits. We then wound our way to the fly fishing section and I helped him pick out several flies to restock his boxes. I still can’t believe that I escaped the store spending less than $100. My wife later asked if I was feeling ok.

The dining room table back home became our base of tackle operations. The two of us emptied the contents of both his old tackle box and his vest onto the table. He organized his reels and fly boxes into the large store space while I took all manners of weights, swivels, jigs and crankbaits out one at a time and organized them by species. I took the four flat tackle boxes and created small compartments for his gear. I enjoyed looking at each different lure, careful not to stick myself on the sharp treble hooks or drop them in the shaggy carpet below.

Old shrimp and herring oil had spilled in his box at some point in the past and I was wiping the gooey mess from each lure as I carefully laid it into its new space. Once complete we put everything together and snapped the new tackle box shut. The process took about an hour and we quickly scrubbed the table of any evidence of what we had just done before my mother-in-law came home from work.

While we couldn’t make it out on a fishing trip during this visit, we did the next best thing by organizing gear, planning future adventures and reminiscing on ones we had made in the past.