All of my gear is in a constant state of flux. Species-specific gear comes in and out, rods come in and out, then everything fishing-related comes out and hunting stuff goes in for November. It’s always chaos and I’m convinced the storage will never be “perfect” on any boat whatsoever for me!
if it helps your situation, with tackle I try not to rely heavily on the boat storage much at all but I just keep plano boxes in a tackle bag most of the year and swap them out depending on what I’ll be doing. The exception was a big boat-in trip where I needed all available floor space for camping gear, so all the tackle got stuffed into every available compartment.
I’ve got a large compartment that is solely tackle/baits that I toss in what I need before each outing. If I know I won’t need it, I try to take those trays out…especially if I am taking other people out.
I know a few guys who literally use their boat as storage for anything and everything possibly related to fishing. To me that creates a disaster or excessive weight/clutter that is pointless. I’ve got a spot in my garage that has my gear and my boat gets backed up next to and under it. The last thing I do before hooking up and rolling is jump into the boat in the garage, grab what I need off the adjacent wall/cupboards, and toss out what I know I won’t use based on our target species and tactics.
Another thing I do to eliminate clutter is encourage guests to use as much of my gear as possible. With the 4 or 5 guys I regularly fish with we generally have a system where we use the rods and baits that belong to that person whose boat it is. If we are pulling cranks on the river, it’s pointless to have each guy bringing 3-4 trays of crankbaits and their own trolling rods when there are already some in the boat. If we are running bouncers and pulling crawlers the same is true.
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