Be wary of affiliate links...

This morning I noticed a certain blog/website had a post on outfitting your boat for fishing with various affiliate links to illustrate the products being talked about. Like this lure...

The price on the provided Amazon link is a whopping $44.99 which happens to be the most expensive Cedar plug I've ever come across. My go to place to buy lures of this sort is from Tailchaser who sell great lures at very fair prices. Their reasonable facsimiles of the above cedar plug looks like this...

Even better, rigged and ready to go they only cost $8.75 and I'm pretty sure you can do the math without much trouble. If you want an even better price they currently have a couple of rigged cedar plugs on sale for $3.95 which I'm pretty sure beats that $44.99 plug all to hell.

The thing is, while I have done some affiliate sales links and still do a few (Russel Brown's great books, for instance), I feel that doing affiliate sales imparts a certain responsibility to connect one's readers with good fairly-priced products. The lure in question is in no way fairly priced with that sort of insane price tag.

For the record, I do not have any sort of deal with Tailchaser and I only promote them from time to time because they have excellent lures, great service, and their prices are as good as I've been able to find anywhere.

That said, a lot of fishing gear is way overpriced which is one of the reasons I've been putting together a basic fishing kit for cruisers that includes a handline, snubber, bird, flasher, and three of the most successful, sailing speed cruising lures for around $75.00. Which is a roundabout way of saying I've done my homework on what cruising fishing gear should cost just like anyone on a budget should do for any bit of boat gear that's needful.