Use Pool Noodles to Organize Your Tackle
Since the late 1980s, foam noodles have been ubiquitous accessories around swimming pools. They come in a variety of colors and diameters, and are also used in many ways, such as swimming aids or safety devices (the latter despite manufacturer’s label warnings to the contrary). When paired, they facilitate floppy sword play, and when quadrupled, they provide limbs for anyone looking to be Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius on Halloween.
The genesis of the first pool noodle is up for debate. A common theme in most origin stories is that someone familiar with foam tubing in an engineering setting had an epiphany about its potential elsewhere. The most-often cited is that the owner of a family business specializing in fabricating extruded polyethylene foam backer rods and pipe insulation often brought factory samples and prototypes home. Eventually, some gray 9-foot rods found their way into his swimming pool and inspired his eureka moment. Pastel colors replaced drab industrial gray, and kids replaced a target audience of contractors, builders, and plumbers. Another often-cited story involves a swim coach exploring redesigning a pull buoy, a device that creates additional resistance to strengthen swimmers’ arm, shoulder, and back muscles. Historically, these were constructed from commercial-grade polyethylene tubes. The coach had his “Aha!” moment one day while watching kids play with the cylinders of a pull-buoy prototype he was working on. The coach wrapped tubes in colored tape to transform them from dull training devices to colorful swimming pool toys.
Pool noodles have no patent protections and are produced by many manufacturers, marketed with names such as “pool noodles,” “swim noodles,” and “water woggles.” They also have properties that are perfect for fishing related do-it-yourself projects: buoyancy, shock-absorbency, flexibility, plus they can withstand repeated hook-point insertions and removals, and are quite inexpensive.
For my DIY noodle hacks, I typically purchase 4½-foot long, 2-inch diameter noodles for a buck each at a local dollar store. Often in conjunction with nylon cable ties, duct tape, electrical tape and/or Velcro tape, I can transform a noodle into an ingenious contrivance that improves some aspect of my overall fishing experience. While I devised many hacks on my own, I’m sure others have come up with the same or very similar ones. For this article, I will discuss my top three hacks that may inspire you to come up with other uses on your own.
Teaser Rig Holders
There are many options for adding teasers to enhance the presentation of traditional plugs and lures. Some anglers attach the eye of the teaser’s hook directly to a dropper loop placed in the leader roughly 16 to 22 inches up from the plug. The benefit of this arrangement is that it minimizes the chances of a teaser fouling the leader or mainline. It also requires no additional hardware. However, if you are concerned with weakness that a knot in the leader may create (particularly when targeting bigger fish), a separate and shorter line for the teaser can be tied directly to the leader side of a barrel swivel or to the third eye of a combo or three-way swivel.
This approach also minimizes the likelihood of a toothy fish cutting through the leader line and separating an angler from an expensive plug. The increased breaking strength and better isolation between lure and teaser comes at the expense of increased terminal tackle and potential of the primary and secondary leaders tangling and disrupting the lure presentation. I prefer yet a third approach, a middle ground between the two techniques. I cut roughly a 7-inch piece of leader material and attach a teaser at one end and a perfection loop at the other. I use a loop-to-loop connection to attach the pre-tied teaser rig to a dropper loop placed roughly 20 inches up my leader from the plug. I carry a bunch of pre-tied rigs with an assortment of teaser types, such as bucktail, feather, and soft plastic. The loop-to-loop connection means I can quickly swap out one teaser type for another as I experiment to determine the most effective one for the moment. In addition, this arrangement allows for some of the benefits of the second approach without the need for a swivel.
“Thanks for the advice on teaser options, Bill, but what does this have to do with pool noodles?” you might ask. This is a valid question, so let me explain. Many of my surfcasting outings are done on foot in search of fish actively chasing bait and spots conducive to stirring up or aggregating fish forage. On most of these excursions, I like to travel light. In addition to my rod and reel, I have a small three-tube surf bag with a side compartment for a pair of pliers with cutting edges and a front pocket for holding a few bucktails, a small spool of leader, and a re-purposed prescription vial containing some power clips and miscellaneous tackle. Attached with electrical tape to the outer edge of one of the tubes is one half of a 5-inch piece of pool noodle cut along its diagonal. I embed the hook points—past their barbs—of several prepared teaser rigs into the foam, creating safe and easy access to the pre-tied teasers.
Before I added this modification to my surf bag, I would drop a few teaser rigs directly into the tubes or in the front pocket. It was hard to retrieve a rig from a tube, particularly when standing out on an isolated rock in the water. Often, this maneuver resulted in the contents of my surf bag falling and becoming lost in the Atlantic Ocean. Even on the occasions when I managed not to empty my bag into the sea, the teasers in the pocket often drew blood when I reached inside.
For long treks covering miles, in addition to my plug bag, I wear a sling pack or backpack to carry essentials such as sunscreen, bottled water, and snacks. The pack also allows me to carry additional gear and tackle, among which is an 8-inch section of pool noodle for holding a variety of pre-tied teaser rigs. The hook points are embedded into the cross-sectional face of the noodle cylinder. The leader material runs down the outer curved surface where I use an elastic band to hold all the line in place.
Equipment & Tackle Organizers
Most of us don’t have the luxury of walking out our front door directly to our favorite fishing locales. It is much more common to travel a considerable distance from one’s residence to where the fish are. Weather forecasts and reports are sometimes misleading, or conditions change while one is en route. As such, it is advisable to bring a wide range of equipment and tackle along for the ride, allowing you to pick and choose according to the conditions.
I travel with what I call my tackle “Treasure Chest,” a large plastic bin filled with two 1-gallon buckets, each inside of a larger 5-gallon bucket. Collectively hanging from these buckets are roughly 250 artificial baits of hard plastic, soft plastic, metal, and wood in a variety of sizes and colors.
The outer buckets are held in place by cut strips of pool noodle wedged between them and the lower portions of the bin’s sides. Each inner bucket is held in place by nylon screw assemblies through the bottom center. At the top of one long side of the bin is a strip of pool noodle, attached with double-sided Velcro tape, for embedding hooks, teasers, and some soft plastics that can’t simply hang from a bucket rim. Lengths of poodle noodles are sliced along their curved surface through to their hollow inner cores and fitted to the rim of each of the 5-gallon buckets, then 14-inch nylon zip ties are used to hold the noodle material in place. This arrangement effectively extends the depth of the larger buckets to accommodate longer plugs as well as preventing the lures from shifting and clumping up when the bin is moved. I also keep a telescoping magnetic pickup tool on hand to easily access lures that occasionally fall between the inner and outer buckets. With my treasure chest in tow, I am prepared for surf casting in just about any weather situation.
Shims, Wedges, and Holds
A pool noodle can be bent at extreme angles as well as compressed, all while maintaining a high degree of rigidity. A foldable sheetrock knife blade is long enough to slice through polyethylene cylinders up to 5 inches in diameter like butter, and a utility knife is perfect for whittling the resulting foam pieces to any desired shape. These physical attributes make it ideal to fashion contraptions to cradle things safely in place, as its application on my sit-on-top kayak illustrates. My kayak is rigged with CHIRP, SideScan, DownScan and charting electronics powered by a sealed lead acid rechargeable battery in its body. To protect the battery from moisture that often builds up inside the kayak or, worse still, gets in while I am storing or retrieving something through one of its many hatches, I’ve constructed a watertight enclosure using a polycarbonate O-ring-sealed box, waterproof cable glands, and weather-resistant wire connectors. The box’s size is larger than the battery itself, so I used pieces of pool noodle left over from another project to keep the battery from shifting inside the box.
In addition, I cut a pool noodle in half along its cylindrical surface to create something resembling a speed bump. Inside the body of my kayak, accessible via its centrally located hatch, I adhered four pieces of the “speed bump” into a rectangular shape slightly smaller than the dimensions of the battery box. This makes a simple yet effective pressure-fitting mount for the watertight enclosure, keeping it from jostling inside the hull of the boat while I’m paddling, pedaling, exploring, and fishing.
Honorable Mentions
The Pool Noodle Swordfish Float
The pool noodle has also found a home in the offshore fishing scene for nighttime swordfish. When a swordfish takes a bait, it will often swim away from the weight, which means it will rise towards the surface. This clever contraption has a glow stick inserted inside the top and the bottom of the noodle. It will float vertically, but if a fish takes the bait and rises to the surface, the float will fall to a horizontal position, indicating a bite.
The noodle-related DIYs mentioned above are currently my favorites. There are countless other hacks using noodles as rod racks, rod-tip protectors, ice-fishing transducer levelers, fly-tying material holders, fishing-net floats, bobbers, and fillet-knife sheaths, to name a few. What we fishermen can do with pool noodles is only limited by the capabilities of the gray-matter noodles embedded in our heads.
Related Content
DIY Off-Season Reel Maintenance
How to Make a Neck Light for Surfcasting
Source: https://onthewater.com/use-pool-noodles-to-organize-your-fishing-tackle
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