Forget The Winter Clean Up. Just Sell Your Old Lures

Each and every year, many of us resolve to commit to the arduous tasks 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% of our bass fishing time. Heck, I know several blue collar retired guys that have piles of used baits that never get to winter reorganization, never mind the guy still trying to work and attend family stuff. To be honest, I don’t even try to execute this massive yearly clean up 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 you often end up with pods of used obscure lures that somehow fail to get put away correctly (like the pile in the photo I found last week from two seasons ago). A solid 1/3 of those baits are one-time tries that will likely never see the water again. A good part of the other 2/3 of the pile can be rendered unusable (by an OCD fisherman like me) until new hooks are put on and they get a cleaning. What I’m getting at is that even though you have big expectations, you’re not likely to find the time in the new year to deal with these piles, unless for those select cases when there is something of importance in there that you need to get to. 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.

The best way I’ve found to rid your mind, body, and spirit of these lure clutter clusters is to Ebay them. I stand by the old saying, “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” I’ve found it to be amazing that the mistake you made by buying a lure to catch bass in XYZ lake in Ohio, is the best lure-buying decision ever for someone else to try and catch fish in ABC lake in Texas. The global market opens up a whole world to fishing equipment, no pun intended. But, I’m not going to get into how to properly sell the stuff on your own. I actually advise finding someone that has a business selling used stuff on Ebay, preferably fishing stuff, and letting them do it for you in exchange for a percentage of the sales. Simply tell them this: “I want to hand you a giant pile of fishing stuff, you arrange it for sale on Ebay, and send me a check when its gone.” The day you get the check, I assure you will be super happy to put that towards new bass fishing goodies to eventually make more piles…hopefully of the stuff you know you need and will use often. Just be sure to ask what cut of the sale you get vs the Ebay seller. And a seller that is more savvy with how to sell fishing lures, will get you more cash for your stuff.