Some handy lure boxes for the smaller stuff - IMA Lurecase 3010 and the HTO Double Latch Box 20.5cm, both under £10
You most likely do things differently to me, but when I go out for a “typical” bass fishing session, I tend to take two of those washable type lure boxes that both fit into my HPA Chest Pack (which sits on my side, around my waist). One is usually the box with vertical slots in which I put most of my hard lures and metals, and the other is usually the box with horizontal slots. Into this box go my soft plastics and/or any hard lures over 140mm which will not fit into the other box……….
The HTO Double Latch Box 20.5cm, I talk about this box further down the page
The Savage Gear washable lure boxes I use all the time
Because I have a few here, I tend to use the Savage Gear washable lure boxes. I pushed for these to become available, and I pushed specifically for the two types - vertical and horizontal slots. If these specific lure boxes are out of stock you can find an alternative horizontal slot box here, then have a look here for various vertical slot options. I did buy one of the (way too expensive) Meiho Reversible Lure Tray 180V lure boxes a while back (as per the photo below), purely to see what it was like when compared to the ones I usually use - and I far prefer the cheaper boxes to be honest. I find the Meiho type latches quite annoying to open and close when you’ve got a lure rod trapped under one of your armpits and you’re waist-deep in water. One trick with these types of lure boxes is to get the sandpaper out and give them a good rub down to make them a lot easier to hold in wet conditions.
So unless something much better comes along I am pretty much sorted for the two lure boxes I might usually carry for your typical bass fishing session. As you know though, with how amazing these wonderful fish are, the word “typical” seems to be less and less apt in my mind. The whole scaling down to offer smaller lures is one avenue that increasingly interests me, and if you read this blog on a regular basis you’ll have picked up how much this creature bait/crab imitation stuff is haunting my dreams. What started with a couple of the MegaBass Sleeper Craw creature bait lures has morphed into a larger collection of soft plastics (no way!), jig heads, weedless hooks and skirts - which in turn got me looking around for a specific lure box or two to store this gear in.
Why don’t you just empty your washable boxes out Henry and use them? I can’t be bothered to be honest, not with how cheap most of these lure boxes are, and with the Z-Man soft plastics, some specific Savage Gear stuff, and the MegaBass Sleeper Craw, you are dealing with TPU-type plastic materials which can’t be mixed with other lures, and which can also cause damage to some lure boxes. Z-Man tends to advise that you store their soft plastics in the original packets, but after speaking to a few people I was steered towards a specific type of lure box which seems to resist any TPU related damage.
So first off I bought a couple of the IMA Lurecase 3010 lure boxes, as per the photo above. I like how the lures I might use for much of my estuary fishing sit in these boxes with the dividers, and so far I have seen no damage to the box or any of the lures when I store any of the TPU soft plastics. Note that I don’t mix the MegaBass, Savage Gear or Z-Man lures with each other. IMA obviously don’t make these lure boxes because you can find the same boxes with the names of various tackle companies on them, but I happened to buy a couple of IMA ones.
Then I found a cheaper and potentially even better variation on this type of lure box above the other day, in the shape of the HTO Double Latch Box 20.5cm. Again I assume that some company makes this box for HTO and other tackle companies, but I have only seen this specific “Double Latch Box” from HTO so far, so this is the one I have. I note that the (plastic) materials used in this box feel exactly the same as in the IMA Lurecase 3010 lure box above, but I do like the way this HTO box is divided up into more and slightly smaller compartments. The way the lid opens from either side or can come right off if need be is pretty clever, and I deliberately left the exact box you can see in the photo above on my desk for a couple of weeks when I went to do my recent guiding work in Ireland - and there has been no visible damage to the box or the TPU soft plastic lures. There is a larger 25.5cm version of this lure box, but I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t think it would fit into my HPA Chest Pack. There you go then, you all have a good weekend, roll on 11am tomorrow morning for the 1st Lions Test match against Australia……………….
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