About Fishing Tackle Guide
How the site is funded
Reader commissions, and nothing else. When you buy through a link on this site, the retailer pays us a small percentage. You pay exactly the same price. No brand has ever paid for a placement here and no brand ever will. The full detail is on our affiliate disclosure page.
Getting things wrong
We do. Products change mid-generation, a bad unit slips through, or we simply miss something. When a reader points out a mistake we fix the page and note the change. If something we recommended has let you down, we genuinely want to know: tell us.
StenCycle earns money through affiliate commission and nothing else. No sponsored posts, no paid rankings, no advertiser previews. A brand cannot buy a placement here at any price, and several have asked. Full details are in the affiliate disclosure.
What we do differently
We are anglers who got tired of gear reviews written by people who had clearly never taken the product out of the box.
Fishing Tackle Guide started in 2021 as a shared spreadsheet. Four of us fish different water: two freshwater bass and walleye anglers in the Midwest, one trout and grayling angler who spends most of the season on small rivers, and one who fishes the surf and inshore flats. We kept comparing notes on what actually held up, and the spreadsheet turned into this site.
We buy the gear. At retail, with our own money, in the configuration a normal customer would buy. We do not accept review samples.
We fish it for a season. Not an afternoon. Most of the failures that matters (drag glazing, guide inserts cracking, gears developing play).
We rank by who the gear suits. A 60 dollar reel is the right answer for a lot of people. Several of our top picks are the cheapest item in their guide.
We say when something is not worth it. Every review here has a “what we did not like” section, and we do not pad it with fake negatives.
Start with the guides
Pick a budget, get a shortlist, read why. That is the whole idea.