Today’s shot comes from a June 2016 family camping trip and features the arsenal that a fishing family packs along to keep everyone rigged and ready. A dozen poles in total ranging from ultralight to medium heavy action, including spincast, spinning and baitcasting setups, advertising superheroes and television stars and covering over 30 years of purchases.

The eight lighter action panfish rigs mean that we’ve got a backup for each of the four kids or at least a spare or two for Mom and Dad to join the fun in the unlikely event that we aren’t rebaiting jigheads, cleaning off moss or unhooking fish. These poles include Batman, Superman, Hannah Montana and Lady Shakespeare as well as three of my spinning rigs that date back to the 90s.

2008 – Helena with one of our stubby starter poles

2011 – Carly birthday upgrade and got a “grown up” upgrade last year

2011- Zac gets his first fishing pole from Papa, just like his three older siblings

The heavier end of this dozen consists of some bass fishing gear for my early morning camping trip getaways to chase some bass. And for this outing, I actually pared down my gear to four poles instead of the usual seven that I cram into that old eight foot johnboat.

However, the star of this collection for me is an old spincast setup from 1984 which was the first pole I could call mine. Previously, I’d been just fine using one of Dad’s Mitchell spinning rigs from the 60s or whatever else he had in the shed. Cool thing is, my old rod and reel still reels ‘em as my boy, Jayce, put it to good use just last year.

2017 – Jayce goes old school with his Dad’s pole from the 80’s, lived this scenario myself back in the day.

And there’s even more as we left a couple others at home, no longer use our collection of stubby beginner poles and Carly has since added her own hand-picked spinning rig as a birthday gift last year. Oh yeah, there’s also a couple dusty muskie poles stashed in the rafters of Dad’s garage. And, believe it or not, I just bought four more poles a couple weekends ago, the short ice fishing variety as my boy, Jayce, has his eye on this pursuit after watching some YouTube with me this winter.

Pretty crazy what a fisherman and his family rack up over the years but you can never have enough fishing gear, right? Talk to you later. Troy