If you want technical appraisals and tear-downs then this is not the place - my reviews are personal opinions based on actually fishing with the gear

The other day I blogged about this brand new Penn Slammer IV 2500 spinning reel which I have been fortunate enough to have fished with for more than six months now. I put a video up on YouTube which I don’t pretend to fully understand but I’m enjoying the process of trying to shoot and edit stuff on my own, and whilst as ever I accept that we all have different opinions and so on, I was a little surprised to get this particular comment on that video: “Without a breakdown ( taking apart the reel ) and showing us what's going on inside your review falls far short of an accurate review of an product!!!!! Thumbs down !!!!!”

To which I replied: “You've come to the wrong place. I go fishing with the gear I review, if you want technical appraisals and specs then I'd advise going elsewhere.” There’s no point me being rude when the person who calls themself “Spanky Ham” leaves a comment like that because they are perfectly entitled to do so, even if they have to hide behind a nickname I might add, but it did get me thinking a bit about the reviews I might write on this blog or occasionally now put up on my YouTube channel………..

What on earth gives me the right to review items of fishing gear and tell you lot what I might think about the stuff? Well that’s just it to me - anybody can review anything these days, and why the hell not? How many of us check out some of the reviews on Amazon before we click that yellow “Buy now” button? I have no idea if all the reviews for a particular item are entirely genuine, but I hope that I have enough intelligence to form an opinion and buy the item or not. It obviously helps that on a website like Amazon the returns process is usually pretty easy if said item turns out to be rubbish, but you get my drift.

Who would spend potentially a lot of money on say a new TV before at least doing a modicum of research beforehand? I was eyeing up a new TV a few years ago and I wanted to check out how big a 55’’ screen actually was before buying one, so I dropped into Currys I think it was over in Plymouth. In no time at all a rather young looking sales assistant sauntered over to ask if I needed some help, and he was soon telling me that Sony TVs were the best ones to go for because all the top Hollywood film makers used Sony cameras to shoot their films. Sorry pal, you’ve picked the wrong person to give your sales spiel to, both my brothers work in the film industry and I know enough about the cameras which are often used to know you’re talking out of your backside. Bless him eh?! I didn’t buy my new TV in Currys as you might have guessed.

To those of you who do read my fishing gear reviews, thank you as always, but my point is that I am fairly confident that enough of you have realised by now that I am not exactly a technical guru. I go fishing with the gear I review and if there is something about the item which I like then I might review it on here. I have copped a certain amount of criticism for not doing really bad reviews of fishing gear which again I understand, but my defence is always going to be that nobody pays me to do these reviews and therefore I am not going to waste my precious fishing time using some product that seriously doesn’t do it for me. Nope, I know pretty quickly if I don’t like something - like a bunch of new to the UK rods that I saw a while back and knew from only a few waggles that they were seriously not for me at all - so I’d rather put it aside and try to appraise something which I do like and enjoy using on at least some level.

I have watched any number of say spinning reel tear-downs on YouTube where the whole thing is taken apart and talked about but this just isn’t me at all. Firstly I don’t have the technical skills to be able to do this let alone talk about all the different internal parts with any degree of expertise, and secondly I choose to go fishing and use the gear I’m reviewing in the real fishing world because that is what matters to me. I don’t really worry about where a lure fishing rod is made or which types of carbons are used to form the blank and so on, because at the end of the day I’m going to take that rod out fishing and base my opinions on how the rod performs out in the real fishing world. I am all for different types of reviews and I love how much information is out there these days, but let’s be honest and recognise that most of these people reviewing stuff are no more qualified than you or I to put across their opinions. Guilty as charged, but I do get to see a lot of gear and I do enjoy writing non-technical reviews.

The most technically competent studio photographers in the world can tell me that the camera system I currently use for my photography does this and that utterly perfectly for example, but out in the world in which I operate with my camera bodies and lenses I happen to think there is a flaw to the system which from time to time drives me frigging mad. I have been a photographer who works in the environments I do for quite long enough to know that this flaw is not user error, but perhaps because how and where I work is a little different to most other photographers I am finding a flaw that was not found during testing. It’s no different with all this new Savage Gear stuff we have been working on and releasing to the market. It has all been rigorously tested and evaluated and modified and so on, but at some point in the future I am sure an angler will end up using some of the gear in a way in which we could never have envisaged - and they might end up finding some minor flaw which we need to fix or modify for the next product life cycle and so on.

So please as always take any reviews I might do in the way they are meant to be taken - Henry Gilbey’s opinions via fishing with said item when he goes out fishing. Nothing more and nothing less. If you want to see or read about spinning reels being stripped right down or technical appraisals of how a rod balances on your forefinger which isn’t how I actually hold a rod when I’m out fishing anyway, then I’d suggest looking elsewhere for a bit of research on an item of fishing tackle you might be interested in. You all have a good weekend, please stay safe and well and enjoy the fact that August hasn’t been summer for a fair few years now!