I buy a lot of what I call “dual use” gear. These are items that I’ve purchased for my adventuring on the weekends or during my extended hunting and fishing vacations but during the rest of the year enjoy time in the normal rotation of my closet. I have the luxury of working in IT so I do have a bit more relaxed of a dress code than many other people. However, this also means that when I need to wear a collared shirt, I can reach for a Columbia PFG Fishing Shirt. Yeah, it has vents in the back generally for the hot weather, but my co-workers don’t seem to care. Works great for people who overheat all the time! I have several of them in my wardrobe, and it’s the only way I can justify owning so many shirts that retail for something like $60, but they go on sale often, and I’ll snap them up when they do.
Maybe that seems goofy, well how about your boots? Who reading this wears $300 boots every day? Not a lot? Who amongst us wouldn’t bat an eye about paying the same for some really good whitetail boots and only wear them for a couple weeks per year? More? That seems wierd to me. I shell out some extra cash every few years to enjoy some quality American made boots, and I break them in while in the cubicles instead of on the side of the mountain. Sure, my Danners see more desk time than field time right now, but they also fit me like a glove. They’ve also taught me some valuable lessons in proper care of full grain leather boots which I’ll keep with me the rest of my life. While this means I may ultimately need to buy more than one pair of hunting boots over the course of my life, I was previously destroying a pair of combat boots nearly every 9 months. I’m on my third year with my Danner Light II’s, meaning that the original cost of $241 from Amazon over the course of three years is basically $80/yr. That I can completely live with.
How about rain gear? It seems like every year when I take a week off for the trout opener it just pours rain. For years I dealt with crappy trash bag like rain gear as I schleped gear through the woods to my local trout water. No more! I saw the Columbia Supercell rain jacket, and after trying a bunch of other “tournament grade” rain gear, that’s what I ended up with. It’s low key enough that I can wear it in to work during a squall and not have anyone make comments about going duck hunting after work — not that I would care if they did honestly. There’s no reason that this jacket should be sequestered only for sporting use. I bought it for the rain and it doesn’t know the difference of a city rain versus the summer thunderstorm as you pull your bass boat off the water.
Half of my wardrobe is blaze orange, if only because I moved to a warmer climate. In my first two years in Maryland I had no idea how to dress for the deer and small game seasons. Coupled with the fact that I went to a school with the school colors being brown and blaze orange, I now own enough orange to safely outfit an entire hot weather hunting camp. There are some things that you won’t catch me using outside of hunting or fishing season. For one, I spent a mint on Filson double tin cloth pants. I can hardly justify them even when romping through brambles, let alone attempting to wear them during an office meeting out of some fetishist hipsterism for American made goods (guilty!).
There’s plenty of other areas you can take a look at, like if you carry a pocket knife — get a good one. Consider these pieces to be part of your entire lifestyle and not just an accessory for hunting and fishing and you’ll feel much more able to justify those expensive purchases. Assuming you’re the only one that needs convinced…
How can you justify it?
Look, you don’t need me to sell you on justifying something. However, take a knife for instance. I like Benchmade products as well as others — at a couple hundred bucks that’s somewhat difficult to justify for something that sits in your hunting gear box all year round and then gets used for a couple weeks before going back into the box. Now, if you’re not one to lose a pocket knife — take the cost of a new Benchmade knife, around $200. If your knife lasts more than a year, let’s call it two if you just can’t seem to hold onto a knife, and it’s your daily carry knife that does double duty in the woods that means that you’ve got that knife for 730 days. That’s .27 a day or 1.90 a week. Really? That’s cheaper than any coffee I know of, and much more useful.
Most of my gear I get on season or year end clearance. I rarely pay MSRP for gear, because I’m just that cheap unless it’s something I just have to have, or something in my arsenal just broke and needs to be replaced before or during a trip. For instance, that awesome Columbia Rain Jacket I mentioned above? $300. For a jacket. Sheesh. However, patience paid off — after two years of swooning over the Supercell in all its glory, and getting soaked and damn near hypothermic at two trout openers I finally saw one March that Columbia had either forgotten to exclude their jacket from a sale or that they wanted to move additional product. Score. The jacket was all of a sudden 60% off and well within my price range, so I jumped on it. That tactic doesn’t work on everything, so save your pennies. One thing that I do is to hide money from myself. All my loose change goes into a change jar, and then goes into a Coinstar or something like it when there’s an exorbitant amount. Those get converted to Amazon gift cards (since you don’t lose any value there) and I get two day shipping on neat outdoor stuff. Another tactic is to only use your credit card reward money for cool stuff. I’ve been on several weekend trips in the mountains and purchased several rifles with only money saved from 1-2% cashback on credit cards. Not a bad racket for bread and gas buying hunting equipment.
You can choose to support a cause with your gear, be it where it’s made or who’s logo it has on it. Sometimes a polo with the Ruffed Grouse Society and an UnderArmour polo are the same price… one gives some of the profits to charity.
Supporting a Cause
Some of my purchases also support a cause. In my case, I try to buy American where possible. Filson and Danner are two such companies that if you look hard enough, you can find some of their high quality products are made right here in the USA. Likewise with the knife companies. If their product is made in the US, I’m more likely to spend a little more cash to help some other folks who are just as likely sportsmen as I am. I frown upon companies that tout that they are American “Designed and Engineered” and made in China. I recently bought one such product with a prominent American Flag on the rear of the package, thinking I got something I would use that was made by Americans. Well, an American engineered it, and then it was manufactured in China. But that’s personal politics. I won’t judge you if you let your pocketbook decide where to spend your money.
