Shaping Up Gear Reviews for 2026 –
How I Make Gear Review Meat From Sausage
Yes, the meat I make may amount to barbacoa, but I was raised on barbacoa, so it makes perfect sense to this Borderlands boy. Let me explain …
This video does my best to present, to anyone who watches or reads my fly fishing gear reviews, what is actually going on when I review fly fishing gear that I think may have a value to me and potentially – to you. That first gate, alone, is daunting, sometimes heavy and sometimes off the hinges. But … I still enjoy the lift and scrape of that fine aluminum on caliche, so I attempt, with more disclosure than anyone else CURRENTLY doing fly gear reviews, to give you readers and watchers the true facts from my OWN perspective.
But until now, I never created a “Rosetta Stone” video that explains this, and if you are into watching painful thought, this is a video for you! It is only painful because of the difficulty of explaining my differences in gear and its sometimes overwhelming cost. Enter THE GAPE. It was the best most visual (you realize I am a visual guy right?) analogy I could conjure up, a real “gape” being that distance between the shank and point of a fish hook.
NOTE: As soon as I took clue of listing my brand partners on my YouTube descriptions, I automatically included them in every video. And in some cases, I even backtracked into the archives to refill descriptions with that information. ALL OF THIS was done to be sure people watching the videos understood whether or not I had skin in the game, and whether the brand I was reviewing had skin in MY game. But I am pretty sure I never listed them in a post! THE PAGE is HERE – PARTNERS.Going into 2026 these are the brands I do have agreements with:
- Sawgrass Fishing Rods
- Simms
- Sage
- Paramount Outdoors
- Redington
- RIO
- LOON
- YETI
- Wolf Industries aka. Rambler Angler & Blade
As I clear the decks for The Gape 2026, let me say I am always on the lookout for the “up-and-coming” brands, and believe me they are coming – after me and my YouTube Channel. But most are Chinese products that do not relate to anything YOU would ever want or even think about. In the case of Paramount Outdoors (two product reviews), I never knew they existed, and that shoiuld be almost NO surprise.
No, Ford doesn’t give me a truck to drive (Alvin), nor does Toyota (Conway). No, I don’t get strange things to promote like electric bikes, although that offer has been taken by fly fishers with much greater presence than my own – and he’s in the Texas fly epicenter AUSTIN, TEXAS. And if I want those complications, I will certainly ask for them. With the huge changes coming to YouTube in 2026, those kinds of endorsements will probably start to come with HUGE (advertising) strings attached for the creators that are truly big in the fly world.
The Gape is my balancing act between expensive gear, and less expensive gear. None of it is cheap, and if it is “cheap,” think TEMU, chances are you’ll never see that GEAR here … because so much of it is truly bad.
