What is it that you do? What are you passionate about? Questions we all get asked several times in life. What we do does not usually cross paths with our passions. Throughout my life my passions have changed. I was passionate about running, signing up for a new race every weekend, then shifted to nutrition, understanding all the macros I was putting into my body and then spent a while lost. I started spending more time on the water than in my running shoes and one day noticed some fishing line dangling from the mangroves. I collected that and continued my paddle not thinking much of it. As I continued to go out, I started noticing more and more things stuck in the mangroves. Before I knew it, I had a hobby. A weird garbage tetanus based hobby, but a hobby none the less.

After a short amount of time doing this I noticed something, I collected a ton of garbage. Not occasionally, but each and every time I came back with a ton of trash! Do you know how hard that is? Think of the size of a hook… TINY, now, the thickness of monofilament… TINY and I could take these TINY things and fill buckets. Instead of throwing these things out I decided to count how many hooks I’d find over a 3 month period. This means I had to sift through all the tangled rotting debris and sort out anything with a hook attached. This took several days and I am proud to say, I managed to not hook myself once. The grand total over 3 months… 604 hooks. Each lure equaled one hook, each treble lure equalled one hook. 604 HOOKS! In 3 months. Well, it looks like I have a new passion.

But what am I to do with all this stuff? While most of it is trash, some of it is not. And since I have no more room in my tackle box I need to get rid of it before I stick myself. Lately I’ve been working on cleaning all the good hard body lures I’ve kept and replacing the split rings and hooks. I’m currently creating a website that will host the lures for sale and a portion of the proceeds will go to charities that value the same passions I do, like Captains For Clean Water or CROW or SCCF and so on. I’ll have several packages available and the more you buy, the higher the percentage goes to a nonprofit. With any luck, the lures that I do sell won’t end up back in my collection.