Portland Area Man Buys Abandoned Storage Locker With Lots of Fly Fishing and Fly Tying Gear In It

MT_Flyfisher

Life of the Party
A friend of my wife, who knows that I do lots of fly tying and fishing sent these 2 videos to my wife yesterday that show an incredible amount of fly fishing and a fly tying items, plus many other valuable things that were in an abandoned storage locker that a guy reportedly bought for just over $500. I don’t know anything about this guy, but he’s apparently a full time reseller of items that he buys in these abandoned storage lockers. He goes by the name of Wades Ventures, and there’s more information about him on Facebook, plus he sells on EBay and is also on Instagram.





Unless you’ve got a couple hours to spend looking at these entire videos, if you scroll through them you’ll see a lot of fly fishing and fly tying items scattered throughout as he opens many of the boxes that are in this locker. At the start of one video you can also see what appears to be several rod cases at the front of the locker that he mentions in passing, but then later he shows huge amounts of fly tying stuff, hooks, etc. etc.as he opens individual boxes. (you can see a lot of these items, but nowhere near to all of it, beginning at about the 50+ minute mark in the second video.)

I don’t know if the guy has an actual brick and mortar store where he sells these items, but it would be interesting to see these things in person, and you might be able to buy some of it from him at a reasonable price.

What’s most interesting to me is who owned this storage locker, and what happened to the guy (or people) that owned it? Did he die, or what became of him? When people die their relatives (or the executor of their estate) often do not know where all of their assets, such as this storage locker, are located, and it gets abandoned, like this locker apparently was.

I don’t know the individual state laws which govern the sale of these storage units, but I believe that they are typically auctioned off to the high bidder when the person that rents the locker gets in arrears in paying the locker rental. I believe the owner of the storage unit is able to retain the auction proceeds up to the amount that recovers the past due rentals, and any other associated expenses, and the excess (if any) is supposed to be remitted to the tenant (if they can find them).

One other thing, on a slightly different subject, is unclaimed property that escheats to the individual states. I believe every state treasury has a website where you can look online to check whether there is unclaimed money, or other property, there that belongs to you, a friend or relative. I look at these web sites quite often, and frequently find money or other valuables belonging to many of my friends and relatives. (Unfortunately, I never find anything belonging to me). In total, there are tens of billions of dollars of unclaimed property in these state treasuries.

Here are the unclaimed property websites for Washington and Oregon, if you want to do you own search:


TIP: If you do a search, begin by entering the least amount of information permitted, such as your last name only. After doing that, perhaps add only a town name or zip code to your search criteria.

John
 
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Very sad that the owner of all that fly fishing equipment didn't have time to sell or donate it before his death.
 
Very sad that the owner of all that fly fishing equipment didn't have time to sell or donate it before his death.
I don’t know if the original owner died, or something else happened to him. But based on the age of those items, together with how well they were packed and taken care of, a good guess might be that he died, and as you say that’s very sad if that was the case.

One of my son’s is in the real estate business, and has (or had the last I heard) a number of garages that he rented. One of his tenets - a good fellow according to my son - was shot and killed. I remember hearing my son say that he had to cut the lock to get access to the garage, but I didn’t hear what became of the contents. I presume a relative claimed them.
 
Grandpa was a SERIOUS fly tyer, and spent a lot of money at Kaufman's! My guess is he had this stuff in storage in his twilight years, or relatives inherited it, and didn't know what to do with it.

There are probably some hooks and exotic materials there that are highly coveted. Maybe some polar bear or seal's fur? The rest he'd probably have to sell in bulk. It killed me to have him show all the flies and throw all those reels to the side. I wouldn't pay money for 40 year old flies unless they were in exceptional shape. Any idea what the silver solid faced reel was?

Things like this are always a good reminder for me to use the stuff I got, and get rid of stuff I don't use.
 
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