One author, and one source of income to declare

FishVerdict covers what holds a line and everything that is used up behind it: spinning, carp, feeder, pole, fly, surf and boat rods; spinning, baitcasting, freespool and fly reels; fish finders, underwater cameras, bite alarms, rod pods and bait boats; waders, buoyancy aids, landing nets and unhooking mats; monofilament, braid and fluorocarbon; hard lures, soft lures, spoons, jig heads and pilkers; hooks, floats, leads, swivels, wire traces and ready-tied rigs; keepnets, scales, pliers, rests, boxes, bags and holdalls — then the feeders, groundbait and boilies bought again every trip. That is 46 categories across five language editions. It is a small independent editorial project, not a shop, not a manufacturer and not a tackle retailer.

The subject is tackle somebody buys for their own fishing. Several neighbouring subjects belong to sister sites: aquarium equipment, and pond and pool nets, which other sites already serve; camping tents and sleeping bags, which belong to the hiking one — a carp bivvy is not compared here. A page may name one of those as a published feature of a product without recommending which to buy. Left out entirely: licences, close seasons, catch limits, and anything presented as advice on whether a given fish may be taken from a given water on a given day. Those are set by law and by the water’s owner, and they differ between two lakes in the same valley. What remains is tackle chosen on the figures a manufacturer puts in writing.

One distinction carries everything else here, and that is why it sits in the body of the page instead of in a footnote. A published figure is a fact about the product and never a fact about the angler. A 3,00 lbs test curve is a stated casting load measured on a bench, not a verdict on the fish it will land; a 5–20 g casting weight is a property of a blank, not a recommendation of a lure for your water. It matters because the gap is not a rounding error: a rod fed a lure below its range never loads at all, and a reel filled with line thicker than its spool was sized for holds sixty metres instead of a hundred and fifty. The same discipline governs a breaking strain quoted without the diameter it goes with, and a newton rating printed as though it were a quality grade.

There is one route by which a number gets onto these pages, and no second: copied from the manufacturer or from the standards body that printed it, credited wherever it appears, and kept in the unit that source chose. Three things follow from that. A breaking strain is reproduced as declared, in the unit it was printed in, and where a maker gives pounds and kilos that disagree by thirty grams the page prints both rather than choosing. A test curve is reported as a casting load and never turned into a size of fish, because the fish belongs to the water and to the person on the bank. And nothing here — no buoyancy aid, no lifejacket, no wading belt — is described as making anything safe: we report what the maker publishes, and hand the rest to the maker's own instructions, to the standard named on the label and to the conditions of the day.

How FishVerdict is paid for

Every "Check price" button on the site is an affiliate link to Amazon, and a purchase made after clicking one earns us a commission. The rod, the fish finder or the bag of groundbait costs you the same either way.

Disclosing an incentive means little unless the direction it pulls in is disclosed with it. Amazon pays a percentage of the sale, so a single bait boat earns many times what a packet of hooks does. Three things stop that arithmetic from reaching the pages:

• Nothing here has ever risen inside a family because it pays better. Commission takes no part in how a family is ordered. Nobody looks up which reference pays most, and every family runs from the modest end upward. Where the cheapest item on the shelf is the right answer — and for a first season it often is — the page puts it there.
• What something costs and what it changes are two unrelated quantities. Some of the firmest recommendations here are among the cheapest things on the site: a rubberised landing net instead of a knotted one, a five-euro pack of ball-bearing swivels that stops a spoon twisting the line into a spring, a mould that makes every feeder ball the same density. Wetting a mat before the fish touches it does more for the fish than most of what is sold to protect it.
• Nothing on this site has ever been for sale to a manufacturer. Not a rank inside a family, not a mention, not a softer adjective. No fee, no sample sent unasked, no arrangement of any description. Should that ever change, the page concerned would say so in its own body, where a reader of that page would run into it.

What these pages may never be turned into

Not one page here is sponsored. No family is a "top ten" assembled out of other people's reviews. No ordering answers to what a reference pays, how well a link converts, or what a warehouse happens to be holding in March.

Nor is anything recommended here on the strength of a specification sheet. A large figure makes persuasive copy and poor advice, and a page built around the biggest number on the carton ends up naming the dearest item in the family every time. So every verdict shows its grounds — what the manufacturer published, what a named standard defines where one is cited, and what owners report after a season or two — and where a judgement leans mainly on one of the three, the page names which.

And there is one recommendation this site will never make, because published figures cannot support it: which tackle your fishing needs. A length, a casting weight and a test curve are properties of a product measured against an assumed angler; what a particular person requires depends on the water, the species, how far they must cast and how often they go, and none of that is printed on any carton. Pages here report what a maker publishes, and say plainly where the published figure stops being enough.

Corrections

Prices move, references are withdrawn, standards are revised, and a maker will change a drag stack, a supplied line or a quiver tip without touching the model name. If something here is wrong, write and say so: it gets corrected and the correction is recorded. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed.