Fly boxes are an essential element of most fly fishers’ gear. The problem is that many of us have too many of them. In my case, I have different boxes of flies for different seasons on the same river; I bought them that way in collections for a particular season.

I built up my fly collection that way, but at cost of too much duplication of the same or nearly the same fly. And then there are the small boxes of assorted nymphs; dry flies; small streamers; larger boxes of streamers; and now I’m beginning a collection of flies for sea-run cutthroat trout.

It’s become almost too difficult to know how many flies I have or where they are. And that doesn’t include the twenty or thirty dollars (or more) every time I need a new fly box for storage.

I read a post on Deneki Outdoors about the use of Plano boxes. These translucent plastic boxes act as fly warehouses; the idea being that you keep all your flies in the Plano boxes and then pull the flies you need for a particular day on the river and put them into a smaller fly box. At the end of the day or trip, you put them back.

Deneki recommended buying a couple for different types of flies. I’m starting with two and see how it goes. If nothing else, it should make maintaining an inventory a good deal easier than sorting through 10 boxes of flies.

And the Plano boxes are a good deal. I picked up two for around $13.00 on Amazon. You can get them here.

I’ll report back later on my efforts.