Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L review - you should be able to find it for around £50, plus how I use rucksacks and what I expect from them

I am doing some work with Savage Gear but this rucksack is nothing at all to do with me. Savage Gear do not ask me to review their gear on this blog and they actually have no idea that I’m reviewing this rucksack yet. For sure I can more easily get hold of Savage Gear stuff to try out these days, but a waterproof rucksack is an essential item for me regardless.

Aside from a hell of a lot of time with the very expensive and specialist and I’m not even sure if they are still available LowePro DryZone camera bags, up until a few months ago my experiences so far with these rolltop style waterproof rucksacks for my fishing have been with mainly with Overboard and HPA (review here). I got on well with the Overboard one but it eventually failed on the bottom of the bag where I guess it didn’t like being put down on the rocks all the time, and then after that I migrated to the excellent but frustratingly still not properly available in the UK HPA rolltop waterproof rucksacks. I prefer the HPA ones over those from Overboard, but I did have an HPA one fail at the bottom of the bag because of sharp rocks again. There is nothing I can do about this with current designs and with how and where I fish, and this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L might fail in the same place eventually.

This is how I see these rolltop style waterproof rucksacks - why on earth would any lure angler who carries a rucksack for their fishing not use a waterproof version? To me they are a complete no-brainer for so many reasons, not least that I can put what I need in them (car keys, mobile phone, waterproof top, extra layer if required, flask of coffee or water, polarised sunglasses, leader, lure clips, and for me, always some camera gear) and then know that when I have rolled the top of the bag down and clipped it in place that this stuff will remain dry when it rains and/or gets splashed. What’s the point of letting gear like this get wet if it doesn’t need to?

Via a lot of time and experience in all kinds of locations around the world with various rucksacks, I like to think that I have come to some logical conclusions about what they can be put through and what to expect from them. I am always carrying some expensive camera gear that I need for my work so my needs may be slightly different to yours here, but in my view these rolltop waterproof rucksacks are not to be 100% trusted to keep your gear dry if you were to wade out and the bottom of the rucksack is going to be permanently submerged or getting washed/covered with water due to waves or whatever. I’m not saying that any of the rolltop waterproof rucksacks you might find are actually going to leak when used like this, rather that the material they are made from isn’t bombproof and there are joins and I have found little pinpricks in these kinds of rucksacks over the years which again I guess have come via putting the bag down again and again on rocks. You may never get any issues if you continually submerge your rucksack by the way, but with camera gear in mine I won’t use them like this, plus I will do almost anything not to actually have to fish with a rucksack on my back anyway. It gets put down somewhere but surf fishing especially has changed how I carry my gear for that - more on that in a blog post here.

That’s not me, but it’s what I did with my camera gear on my back out in the Seychelles

For sure I’ll wade from rock to rock if needs be and not worry about the bottom of my rucksack going in the water for brief periods, but again, if at all possible I will then put the rucksack down somewhere and do my fishing as I always do out of my HPA Chest Pack which sits at my side and carries the lures I need. It was my moving from bulkier and heavier DSLR camera over to this lighter and more compact Fuji mirrorless stuff that first really gave me the chance to move away from the LowePro DryZone camera bags and onto these far cheaper rolltop style waterproof rucksacks, but I still have fond memories of swimming from reef to reef with £5000+ of Nikon camera gear on my back and a rather large shark moving through the gully right beneath me. This was not in the UK I might add! That LowePro DryZone gear was a different kind of waterproof and it was designed to be fully submerged and so on.

Note that I had to stick some reflective tape on the front of the Vass rucksack

Anyway, so for a fair few years now I’ve been using rolltop waterproof rucksacks, and as I said, whilst the HPA ones are not the cheapest ones you will find, they are well made and they are supremely comfortable to carry around. You may get away with a smaller rucksack than me, but it seems to be the 40 Litre capacity ones which suit me the best. I did try the Vass Dry Rucksack-Edition 2 rucksack for a while earlier last year, and whilst the wider design of the bag makes it incredibly easy to work out of, I found the shoulder straps to be pretty rubbish and the rucksack was really uncomfortable to carry and I actually started to get problems with my shoulders because of it. I gave the bag to a mate to see if he could get on with it but he also gave up on it pretty quickly. I love the idea of a wider rather than longer rucksack, but I guess nobody ever walked many miles with a fair amount of gear in the Vass one, whereas with the HPA ones I have used (check on their website here, easy ordering from France if needs be) are so, so comfortable for the sort of walking and scrambling I do with my fishing.

Way before I started working with Savage Gear I got one of their Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L to use mainly for when I marshall at our local ParkRun where both my girls run on a Saturday morning, plus a waterproof rucksack is always useful for days on the beach and so on. I always ask to marshall as far away from the start and finish as possible so I get plenty of dog walking, plus the views high up at our local Mount Edgecumbe ParkRun are breathtaking. With the weather we “sometimes” get, a waterproof rucksack is also extremely useful for this as well - waterproofs, flask of coffee, car keys, mobile etc. I could have obviously used my HPA waterproof rucksack that I was using for my fishing for this stuff, but I tend to keep the bag packed up and ready to go fishing and I can’t stand chopping and changing stuff all the time.

So I guess it was only natural that I swapped rucksacks and started to take this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L out fishing to see how I got on with it. I actually have two of them now - one for ParkRun, and one for fishing, and I really like them. It was noticeable when I first started using this Savage Gear version how compared to the HPA one the shoulder straps feel a bit narrower at the top where they spread out over your shoulders if that makes sense, and because I was so used to carrying the HPA around all the time for my fishing I wasn’t entirely sure about this. You know the score though - something feels a bit different but then you use it lots and lots and it ends up being that which soon feels completely normal. Now when I put the Savage Gear one on my back it feels as normal as the HPA one ever did. The shoulder straps on both rucksacks are very comfortable and I’ve got no issues there.

I don’t know what those orange loop things are for on the front sides of this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L, but I guess you could hook things onto them if needs be. I haven’t found any need to so far. I do think it’s really important to have some kind of reflective tape or strip on any rucksack I might use so I’m glad that this Savage Gear one has some on the front. I have used waterproof rucksacks before for my night fishing that didn’t have any reflective tape on them and it’s a bloody nightmare. I have put the dark coloured rucksack down on the beach or rocks and back from the water and then carried on with my fishing, and of course you end up moving around a fair bit and when it comes time to go to your bag for tea or coffee or leader or hat or it’s time to go and I can’t find the bloody thing in my headlamp and I’m wandering around like a tit trying to find my rucksack! This happened to me a few times so I bought some reflective tape and stuck it to the rucksack but of course it’s always coming off - hence me liking waterproof rucksacks which have something reflective on them already.

The zip on the pocket on the front of the rucksack is not a waterproof zip which I always see on wader pockets as well, and whilst it makes little sense to me to have a waterproof bag or item of clothing which then lets water into pockets, proper waterproof zips I guess add to the cost plus they need a bit of lubrication based maintenance which ain’t going to happen with a lot of people. This is what I do though - even though these bags are waterproof and you don’t therefore need extra waterproofing inside them, I buy some of these cheap as chips and very lightweight but not particularly tough waterproof little rolltop bags like these ones here and in the screenshot below. Into one of them goes my car keys and mobile phone and then because it’s so much easier than trying to root around in the bag for them when I get back to my Epic Berlingo, into that front pocket goes that little waterproof pouch/bag and it’s problem over. I then put leaders and clips and whatever spare hooks and little bits of fishing tackle I might be carrying into another one and this lives inside the rucksack, and in the third one lives my headlamp, hat, sunnies, suncream and so on. To me it’s a handy way to be organised inside the rucksack plus if it’s peeing it down with rain and I’m getting to my camera gear or a waterproof jacket or whatever, I can lift these cheap as chips little rolltop waterproof pouches out of my main rucksack and put them down without more stuff getting wet.

As I said near the top, I am nothing to do with this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L, and as with the other rolltop style waterproof rucksacks I use, I won’t be remotely surprised if this one ends up leaking from the bottom of the bag over time. This may well not happen to you if you aren’t putting it down on (sharp) rocks so much of the time, but I am being realistic with how I go about my fishing and it’s an inevitability I reckon. I can’t imagine rucksacks like these are really designed for what a lot of us might put them through, but at the price I can pick this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L up for I am not really complaining. If my hugely more expensive and much more sturdily designed and built LowePro DryZone camera rucksacks had ever failed like this I’d have gone loopy though, but I went through a few of them over the years and I never had a single leak.

I really like this Savage Gear Waterproof Rollup Rucksack 40L. It’s not too expensive if you look around, it’s comfortable to carry, I find these simple rolltop designs very easy to use because I am so used to them, I like the reflective tape and via those cheap little rolltop waterproof bags I already use anyway I have found a good use for the pocket on the front of the rucksack, it’s keeping my gear dry when it pisses it down or the water’s splashing around, there’s nothing to rust, and at the end of the day I haven’t really got anything to complain about. I can’t find any signs of damage to the bottom of the bag yet after a lot of use, but if it does end up leaking a bit then it’ll be no different to any other rolltop waterproof rucksack I have used and abused. The thing I really like is that I am now working with Savage Gear and I have a few ideas about how a rolltop style waterproof rucksack like this could be improved upon for the sort of fishing so many of us do. I don’t know if I will get the chance to implement these ideas, but I’m going to try………………

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