Ideas for Boat Storage:
Stick It! (Somewhere)
Storage space is at a premium in small boats. Here are some of the things we did in Toy Boat 2... Stick It! (Somewhere)
So far we've covered gear and rod storage. What about the tools and tackle that we use during the course of a day?
Center consoles have a lot of walk-around room for fishermen, but very little counter-top space for rigging tackle and holding used lures. Toy Boat 2 is especially bad because most of the counter-top space is occupied by the sonar, the GPS, the compass, and the two cup holders. To provide a little more room, we fabricated this tackle shelf, which is strapped to the console handrail with zip ties:
The shelf is about 28" long, 6 inches wide, and 1 inch deep. It's worked out well for us. We use it to hold used lures, temporarily hold pliers, etc. It makes a convenient place to hang trolling feathers or jigs as well. We drilled some drain holes in the corners, so at the end of the day, we leave all the lures and hooks in the tray, then rinse them off and let them dry.
We used to carry a pair of pliers in our pocket, or in a belt sheath. With Toy Boat 2, we stopped doing that. We added this vertical rod holder to the back of the bait tank, but not to hold rods. One tube is reserved for the bait net, one for a flashlight, and one holds the extension handle for our electric motor (not shown).
The rack has holes and slots for pliers and knives. We use it to hold a needle-nose plier, a pair of dikes, a pair of scissors for cutting spectra, a Braid plier for crimps and opening hook eyes, a fillet knife, a file for sharpening hooks, and a place to clip the Boga Grip. Flatline clips are looped over one tube, and a small club goes over another. Just about every hand tool we use on a regular basis is readily available from this spot.
We added this binocular box to the console mainly to cover the hole that the radio used to be in (see the note in "The Tao of Rigging - Part II"). However, it's also turned out to be a convenient place to stuff odds and ends. We keep the sunscreen and lip balm, contact lense wetting
solution, spare cotter pins and zip ties, and the drain plug wrench in the box. When we use the binos, they just sit on top of the junk. We also drilled drain holes in this guy as well.
The "End Game" tools like the gaff, release stick, landing net and tagging stick sit in pole holders mounted beneath the rod racks. Convenient and out of the way. Gaff and release stick on the port side, net and tag stick on the starboard side.
We use a Fenwick landing net with a folding hoop that collapses into a fairly narrow profile (see right). We wish we could get a knotless mesh bag for the net, so it would be less damaging to small halibut and other fish, but have been unable to find one that fits. The net is strong enough to handle at least a 15 lb fish (the largest we've tried to use it on so far). 
And believe it or not, you can actually open the net with one hand!
As a convenience, we added a plier and knife holder (shown to the left) to the front of the console. This holder could also take a small knife.
We placed these hooks on the front of the bait tank to hang our throwable Type V PFD. Having a readily available Type IV has been a top priority for us for a while (long story, explains the scar on the inside of my right leg). This works out well.
We decided to keep the ditch bag in the luggage rack, where it is easily accessed. As mentioned earlier, we also stick our wallet, car keys, etc. in the ditch bag in a ziplock plastic bag. It would be ironic if we survived an abandon ship incident, only to discover that we had left the car keys and driver's license in the boat...
One thing that we want to change soon is the fire extinguisher location. It's currently positioned under the console top, which seemed to make sense at first - handy to the captain, and protected from the elements.
But about a year ago, we had an incident where we managed to smoke a solenoid that was located under the console. Fortunately, it was just the Corrosion Block being flashed off, but there was a lot of white smoke coming out from the console for about 5 minutes. In retrospect, if the console had started on fire, we probably wouldn't have been able to reach the extinguisher.
If you stop and think about it, the two most likely places for a fire to start in a center console like an Edgewater (which has almost no bilge to speak of) are in the fuel system back by the engine, or in the console electrical wiring. It is probably not a good idea to locate the fire extinguisher so close to a likely fire source. The only problem is, we haven't figured out a better place to put it...yet.
The last point in this section was actually mentioned in one of the earlier issues - avoid hooking yourself! With exposed horizontal rod racks, the potential to be impaled by a hook on one of your rods is fairly high, so it deserves some attention. Warn your crew, and as we mentioned, try to place any hooks so that they rest on the side of the rod facing the gunnel. For a conventional reel rod in the starboard rod rack (which will naturally rest in the rack upside-down, reel on the bottom), a lure should be hooked on the side of the reel seat or a guide foot away from the reel handles (left side of the rod). This will place the hook in a position where the rod itself shields the hook point when the rod is in the rack.
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