The Truth About Gear

Pulling Back The Curtain On Gear Reviews, Fly Fishing media, Advertising, Etc.

As we move into the holiday season, and as anglers prepare for 2024, we’d like to share a few thoughts on gear reviews, marketing, the fly fishing media and other relevant subjects.  We’ll also include a little information that might potentially help you make educated decisions regarding your future purchases.

Let’s start out with a few basic facts:

#1:  Every single angler — and that includes anyone who writes about fly fishing gear — is both biased and subjective.  Bias and subjectivity are innate parts of the human condition and there’s simply no way around that simple truth.  We’re all wired a little differently and at the end of the day there’s no guarantee that we will all like, or appreciate, the same gear.

#2:  The vast majority of fly fishing manufacturers do not exist to build great products.  Instead, they’re in business to make a profit.  They may indeed build stellar gear — some manufactures certainly do — and they may take pride in the products they create, but making a profit almost always comes first.  We should all keep that in mind.

#3:  As a general rule, companies don’t spend money on marketing and advertising to keep us informed about the best gear.  Instead, marketing and advertising exists to facilitate the transfer of money from the angling public to the manufacturer.  From a fly fisher’s perspective, the first rule of advertising should always be “caveat emptor.”  In other words, let the buyer beware.

#4:  Manufacturers have a financial incentive to support media platforms that say nice things about their gear, as well as a disincentive to support platforms that criticize their products.  Which means that it’s awfully hard to find honest, “you should steer clear of this particular product” reviews.  Think about it.  When was the last time you saw a story about terrible fly lines or horrible fly rods?

#5:  Sadly, many rod reviewers are not good enough casters to offer useful opinions on fly rods.  (It’s much easier to review waders, rain jackets or fishing packs, as those particular product don’t require nearly as much in the way of expertise.)

#6:  Fly shops, catalogs and online retailers will almost always promote the brands they carry and ignore the ones they don’t.  At the same time, certain media platforms, as well as some individual reviewers, are beholden to particular brands.  Please keep in mind that it’s awfully hard for a magazine or a YouTube reviewer to criticize gear from one of their advertisers.

#7:  Even the best gear reviews tend to be a bit limited.  Many reviewers receive new gear from manufacturers and offer their first impressions — detailing a brief snapshot in time — rather than long-term perspectives on quality and value.

When you consider all of those points, it seems obvious that uncovering solid information on fly fishing gear can prove a bit daunting.  We can’t trust advertising or marketing.  Businesses that sell gear are biased towards the brands they carry, as are media platforms that derive income from advertising.  Individual reviewers may or may not have the requisite expertise to offer valid opinions, and their opinions will invariably be biased and subjective.  Other anglers have their own innate biases.  So what are we supposed to do?

Here, for whatever they’re worth, are a few suggestions that we believe make sense.

* If you read, or watch, a review that sounds too good to be true, or that mimics the manufacturer’s advertising for a particular product, embrace your inner skeptic.

* Look for reviews that point out a product’s less-than-stellar attributes — here’s a Hatch Magazine rod review that does a good job of this — and keep an eye out for reviews where the reviewer has used a particular piece of gear for six months or more.

* Everything else being equal, lean towards manufacturers that have been around for a while and that have an actual history of making high quality gear and equipment.

* Buy from brands — Patagonia and Orvis are two excellent examples — that support environmental accountability and fisheries conservation.  They are taking the long view and they’re focused on giving something back to the resource, which showcases their ongoing commitment to our sport.

* Unless you’re an exceptional caster — and there aren’t many exceptional casters out there — you might consider dismissing any review that suggests you purchase a fast action or very fast action rods.  (To be clear, that’s a biased and subjective statement.  Which doesn’t make it wrong, of course.  But it should, at the very least, raise a few questions in your mind.  “Why is the School of Trout telling me to steer clear of fast action rods when so many manufacturers emphasize those particular models?)

* Only buy what you actually need.  If you still have cash burning a hole in your pocket afterwards, consider supporting Trout Unlimited, Conservation Hawks, or one of the other excellent conservation organizations out there.

We’d like to finish up by answering a few relevant questions.

Why should readers take this piece seriously?

That’s a tough one.  After all, we’re as biased and subjective as anyone else you’re likely to run into.  Maybe even more so.  Experts should have strongly-held opinions — and we are indeed experts.  Hopefully, our hundreds of years of collective experience lend a bit of extra weight to our opinion.

Have our instructors run across any gear that they can recommend unequivocally?

Yes, we have. Here are a few examples:

“After more than 20 years of use, I feel confident in saying that you can’t go wrong with Filson heavyweight merino wool socks.  (After two decades of fishing the same half-dozen pairs of Filson socks, they’re still wonderful.  Just make sure to follow the manufacturer’s instructions on care.)” — Todd Tanner

“I’ve been wearing Patagonia puffy jackets on the water for quite a while — including one particular jacket since 2009 — and while they no longer look brand new, they continue to offer outstanding performance.  They’re warm, they’re comfortable, and unless you work with barbed wire or spend your spare time pruning Blackthorn, Hawthorn or Honey Locust, a Patagonia puffy should treat you well for years and years.” — Todd Tanner

“While I’d like to tell you that Dan and Doug Daufel at Montana Brothers Rodworks make the world’s finest, most-enjoyable-to-fish, best-casting graphite fly rods, I can’t.  Since I haven’t used every single graphite fly rod out there, I shouldn’t make that kind of blanket statement.  What I can say, though, is that Dan and Doug make the finest, most-enjoyable-to-fish, best-casting graphite fly rods I’ve ever had the good fortune to fish.  While their current production is limited to two different 9’ 4-weights, I’m hopeful that Montana Bros. will eventually add both a 5-weight and an 8-weight to their lineup.” — Todd Tanner

Why are we sharing this information?

We were inspired by Yvon Chouinard, the founder and guiding light at Patagonia. Yvon recently had a stellar piece in the NY Times.  While you should definitely read the whole thing, we’d like to share one particular paragraph from “The High Stakes of Low Quality.”

“To this day, some of the most popular items Patagonia makes were designed in the 1970s and ’80s — essential products that we continue to tinker and refine. The company I founded turns 50 this year. People ask me how it has managed to stick around so long when the average life span of a corporation is less than 20 years. I tell them it’s been our unrelenting focus on quality, which includes making things that last and that cause the least amount of harm to our planet.”

As we head towards the holidays, it’s important to recognize that there's some truly wonderful fly fishing gear out there.  There’s also a ton of mediocre stuff and a fair amount of junk.  If we want to derive the most enjoyment from our time on the water, and if we want to pass along fly fishing to future generations, then we should support the brands that truly give us our money’s worth — and that focus on protecting our future.

The School of Trout is responsible for the content of this essay.