I used to work at a business assistance center helping entrepreneurs with their inventions. We would help them by doing an evaluation of the product by utilizing three outside confidential evaluators familiar with the industry. The process helped the inventor determine whether or not to proceed with their project in some instances. Regarding the patent process, I will simply add this. You may well receive a patent in the future. However, someone may look at your product and be able to make enough changes to it that the folks who review patent applications in WA DC think that those changes are significant enough to warrent issuing another patent. The true test of whether or not your product idea is worth getting a patent is looking at how many you are going to sell if that is your objective. You mentioned that you might just get a tackle company to take your idea nad get royalties. In very very few instances do companies tend to take on a new product that has not been market tested. If you can produce and sell say 1,000 of these lures then you might have a better chance of getting them to take on your lure. They tend to have extensive R&D departments that do their product testing. Even if you show it to a company you might want to consult that attorney mentioned and draw up a non-disclosure agreement. Something that each party signs stating that they will not use the information contained in the disclosure without your permission.

Unless this is revolutionary in design you might just want to produce them and get a bunch sold and not worry about the patent first. Continue to work on it, but I would hazard a guess that some of your ideas were born from the experiences you have gained using other products and retrofitting them to your likes. You can also go and do a complete search for patents on a database at a library that is classified as a depository for federal documents etc. Spokane and Seattle public libraries have them available as well as the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID. You will spend a bunch of time pouring through the documentation.

Good luck!