Storing line and lures: rust, UV and plastics that eat each other

Line: the enemy is sunlight

Monofilament and fluorocarbon are polymers, and ultraviolet light breaks polymer chains. A spool of mono left on a sunny windowsill degrades measurably even though nothing has touched it.

The failure is not visible. The line looks identical and breaks at a lower load than the rating printed on it, which you discover at the worst moment.

Practical rules: store filler spools in a drawer or a closed box rather than on a shelf in daylight. Keep them cool. And when a spool is old, replace it — line is the cheapest component that touches both the rod and the fish, an argument our line page makes at length.

Line already on a reel is partly protected by the spool and by being wound in layers, but the outer wraps get the same exposure. This is one more reason to strip and replace before a new season.

Hooks: rust starts in a closed box

Counterintuitively, hooks rust faster in storage than in use. Salt water is worse, but freshwater rust is entirely capable of ruining a box of lures over a winter.

The mechanism: a lure goes back in the box wet. The box is closed. The water cannot evaporate, so the hook sits in humid air at close to 100% relative humidity for months.

It then spreads. Rust particles transfer between lures sharing a compartment, and a single wet crankbait can start corrosion on everything around it.

The fixes are simple. Shake water out before closing a box. Leave lids open at home to dry. Do not stack closed boxes in a hot garage. And check hooks at the start of a season — our hooks page covers the thumbnail sharpness test, and a rusted point fails it immediately.

A silica gel pack in each box absorbs the trapped moisture and costs almost nothing.

Soft plastics: the chemistry problem

This is the failure that surprises people, because it looks like the lures melted.

Soft plastic baits are PVC softened with a plasticizer. That plasticizer is mobile — it migrates out of the plastic over time, and it is a solvent for some of the paints and coatings used on hard baits.

Leave a soft plastic worm lying against a painted crankbait in a warm box and the paint softens, blisters and fuses to the worm. The crankbait is finished.

Different colors of soft plastic also bleed into each other, and different brands sometimes react where formulations differ.

Rules: keep soft plastics in their original bags. Keep them in a separate box from hard baits. Do not mix brands loose in one compartment. Our organizing page builds this into the box system.

Terminal tackle: the small things that vanish

Hooks, swivels, split shot, beads and O-rings are cheap and infuriating to lose.

A small-compartment box is the answer, and the mistake is putting them in a large-compartment box where they slide into one pile. Our boxes page covers compartment counts.

Keep hooks in their original packets inside the compartments where you can. Packets carry the size, which is the one piece of information you cannot recover by looking at a loose hook.

The shared cause

Nearly all of this comes down to trapped moisture and heat, and the same two rules address most of it:

Dry before closing. Whatever the container, whatever the contents.

Store cool and dark. Not a loft, not a car, not a sunny windowsill.

Everything else on this page is a specific case of those two.

A season-end audit worth doing

Once a year, empty every box onto a table.

Throw away rusted hooks, stiff split rings, bled-out plastics and any lure with a damaged finish. Write down what you actually used, and note what you carried all season and never tied on.

That second list is usually longer than expected, and it is the most useful thing you will learn about your own fishing all year.