Henry Gilbey reviews this hard-wearing and practical piece of kit that will keep your valuables safe and dry, even if you aren’t!
I do a lot of bass fishing tackle development work with Savage Gear these days. However, interestingly, this Waterproof Rollup Rucksack was developed way before I ever started doing anything with them.
I am always carrying camera gear with me when I go fishing, I am bound to use some kind of rucksack, and with the sort of unpredictable weather we get in the UK and Ireland it makes perfect sense that the rucksack I carry be waterproof.
As a result, I have a lot of experience with various waterproof rucksacks, from very expensive and specialist camera bags which have been on my back in the tropics as I have swum from reef to reef with sharks swimming below me, through to something pretty cheap like this 40-litre rollup rucksack.
There are a lot of these rolltop style waterproof rucksacks on the market and I like to think that I know a lot about their various strengths and weaknesses. A rolltop-style waterproof rucksack is not designed for total immersion, but when you roll that top down and secure it, nothing inside your bag should get wet.
Some of them are more comfortable to carry than others – the Overboard bags are particularly easy to wear. With what I do and where I use a rucksack, I would expect the bottom of the bag to wear through after a year or so of hard use; putting the bag down on all kinds of surfaces when I am fishing.
Once the bottom of a rolltop waterproof rucksack goes it’s time to buy a new one.
Two years on and this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L has really surprised me – the bottom of the bag hasn’t yet failed on me.
It will eventually, but from a lot of time and experience I am rather pleased how this rucksack is working out for me. From a practical point of view I find it pretty comfortable to walk long distances with it on my back, once you get used to the slightly narrower spread of the shoulder straps.
The reflective strip on the front of the bag has saved my bacon a few times when I have put the bag down at night and moved around a lot.
The see-through pocket on the front of the rucksack doesn’t really work because the zip is pretty useless, but the rucksack as a whole is brilliant.
I can fit everything I might need at different times of year inside the bag and everything stays nice and dry if I do the top of the bag up properly.
At the end of the day this is a simple item of fishing tackle which I can’t do without and is a whole lot better than I initially thought it might be.
It’s also very good value for money and is a good bag to use if you don’t need to carry much stuff but you want to keep it dry and out of the way.
Available from www.savage-gear.com
