The rod jiggled. Then three rods jiggled. Then six rods jiggled. Then all shook violently, baits and weights flopping to and fro as lures struggled in a knotted mess like calves with bolos wrapped around their ankles. Don’t you just love when your baits get tangled up and tie all your rods in a knot? Your drop shot weight has taken a correspondence class in basket weaving apparently and has now woven him in to nooks and crannies in your favorite reel that it won’t even budge.
Meanwhile your Alabama rig makes five hooks on five swimbaits seem like 25 hooks on a gill net. There are hooks through other hooks through swivels through clasps. It’s bundled up so tight a pair of snips sounds like a better alternative than spending the next hour breaking your lures out of their harnessed imprisonment.
Pro anglers Chad Brauer and Dave Wolak have an ongoing joke when they see anglers with their rods strapped to the passenger seat ramp in the back of the boat and the baits hanging 5 to 12 inches off the end of their rod. They will pass by the boat and motion to the other one with a circular helicopter motion. They call it the “butterfly effect.” By the time the boat runs down the lake at 60 mph, and stops on the first spot, that loose lure has found a way to tie every one of that angler’s rods in a knot.
Tangled rods are frustrating. No denying it. Sometimes you just have to cut your way out of the mess. Drop shots and the new castable umbrella rigs have become particularly annoying when stored or riding on the deck of a boat, not to mention storing open rigs in a tackle box. But we found a little trick to tame these tangle-prone rigs.
The secret: a Velcro strip.
Velcro comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes but the kind we’re talking about has the hard prickly stuff on one side and the soft sticky stuff on the other. It can be wrapped around itself and locks itself in place with … itself (sorry for the Austin Power’s moment). You can buy the strips in rolls and these things are dynamite for a variety of uses with fishing tackle.
We’ve used them recently to store all the different umbrella rigs we’ve been testing them. Rather than bend wires in and out and cause stress points in the wire, we simply wrap the rigs with Velcro and throw them in a big Plano waterproof box. When we unwrap them, the wires spring right into place, and the rig is ready to go.
With a drop shot, we’ll fasten it to the rod first and then begin wrapping it. Before we secure the last wrap around, we’ll slide the line and weight underneath and then finish the wrap. The weight is held against the rod and it keeps that tag-end ball-and-chain effect from tangling other rods. It’s quick and easy and holds the drop shot in place well on a split grip rod.
We’ve used them to secure cables around a trolling motor . It’s a quick and easy way to hold cables in place, makes a great temporary fix for transducer swaps, Hydrowave swaps, etc. The Velcro strips seem to hold up to water, although I have seen some cheap ones finally lose their stickiness over time.
There are probably a lot more uses for Velcro strips for managing tackle and removing some of the frustration. What tricks have you found to organize a fishing mess with Velcro?
