Adventure Medical Kits Ultralight/Watertight .5 — Worth Packing?
A compact, waterproof first aid kit that costs less than a tank of gas and fits in your back pocket. It's not glamorous gear, but it might be the most important thing in your bag.
Nobody wants to talk about first aid kits. They're not exciting. They don't have pull force ratings or a cool double-sided magnet design. But I've been doing this long enough that I've seen what a rusty bolt through a glove looks like, and I started carrying one of these shortly after.
The Adventure Medical Kits Ultralight/Watertight .5 is the kit I keep clipped to my bag. It's small enough that I genuinely forget it's there — until I need it.
Twenty-four bucks. Waterproof. Fits in a jacket pocket. That's really the whole pitch.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're getting into magnet fishing: you're going to handle stuff that has been sitting in river muck for decades. Old bolts, snapped cable, rusted rebar with edges that haven't been kind to anything since the Eisenhower administration. You're pulling mystery metal out of murky water with your hands. The gloves help. They don't help every time.
I started carrying this kit after a trip on the Fox River a couple years back.
I'd snagged something big — turned out to be a chunk of cast iron pipe, completely seized up with rust — and when I finally wrestled it free, one edge caught the back of my hand through my glove. Not a bad cut. But bad enough that I spent the next twenty minutes drip-drying into the mud while my buddy drove back to his truck to find a napkin. A napkin. That was our first aid situation. A fast food napkin from his glovebox. I ordered this kit when I got home.
The watertight case is the thing I keep coming back to. It's a DryFlex bag — heavy-duty, double-sealed — and I've had it submerged in my bag during a full rainstorm, fished it out of a puddle when I dropped my whole kit off a dock, and the contents were dry both times. That matters more than you'd think when everything else you own is wet by the end of a session.
It's not a trauma kit. Let's be clear about that.
You're not getting a tourniquet or a chest seal or anything that's going to handle a serious emergency. What you're getting is the basics — gauze, antiseptic wipes, a couple of bandages in different sizes, some moleskin for blisters, basic pain relief. The stuff that handles the 95% of situations you're actually going to run into riverside. A gash from a hook. A blister from hauling rope all afternoon. A splinter from the wooden dock you're leaning on. That's what this covers, and it covers it well.
The size is genuinely impressive. It's about as big as a deck of cards — maybe a little thicker. I keep mine in the front pocket of my fishing pack and I don't notice the weight. That's kind of the whole point of the .5 version; it's the smallest in their lineup, sized for day trips and people who don't want a full kit hanging off their bag.
If I had to gripe about something — and there's always something — it's that the kit doesn't include nitrile gloves. Which, for magnet fishing specifically, feels like an oversight. You're going to want to glove up before you handle anything you pull out of the water, especially if you've got a cut. I've started just tossing a couple of pairs in the bag alongside it.
This is starter gear for people who've never thought about first aid on the water. It's also just quietly good gear for people who have. My buddy — who's been at this longer than me and is generally skeptical of anything that doesn't directly improve pull force — keeps one in his truck now. He didn't need much convincing after the napkin incident.
