AnglerMag 1325LBS Double Sided Kit — Worth the $45?

The box showed up and the first thing I noticed was the weight. It's heavier than it looks in the photos — which, honestly, is a good sign with magnets. A lightweight double-sided magnet is usually just two weak magnets stacked together with a bolt and a prayer. This one felt like there was actual material there.

That's not nothing.

I took it out for the first time at a canal near me — not going to say which one, but it's been fished by half the people in my area and still somehow keeps producing old bolts and the occasional bicycle frame corner. Threw it off a bridge, let it drag, and the thing stuck hard to a chunk of rebar that was just sitting in about four feet of water. Pulled it up, moved on. The magnet held the whole session without anything weird happening — no slipping hardware, no rope knot working itself loose. For a first outing with a new kit, that's basically all I'm asking for.

The double-sided setup is genuinely useful, especially for beginners. You can drop straight down and pull back without having to think too hard about angle and contact surface — both sides are working, so you're not losing coverage every time the magnet flips in the current. I've seen people buy single-sided setups first and immediately wish they'd gone double. Starting here makes sense.

The rope that comes with it is fine. I mean — it's fine. It's not what I'd use for anything serious, and if you stick with this hobby for more than a few months you'll probably swap it out for something beefier. But it held, it didn't fray in a weird way after one trip, and the knot didn't slip. For the price, I wasn't expecting much and I got a little more than nothing, which I'm calling a win.

The included accessories are the weakest part of the kit.

The threadlocker situation — whatever they throw in there — feels like an afterthought. And depending on when you get yours, the case or bag it comes in might be the kind of thing that survives exactly one season before the zipper gives up. I've seen it. Just be ready to store the magnet in something else if that happens. It's not a dealbreaker, it's just the part of a budget kit that tells you where the money got saved.

Here's the honest pitch: if someone told me they saw magnet fishing on YouTube and wanted to try it without dropping $80 or $100 on a first kit they might use twice, I'd tell them to grab this. Under $45, double-sided, functional. You're going to find stuff, you're going to have a good time, and you're going to either get hooked or you're not — and this kit costs about the same as a decent dinner, so the stakes feel right.

If you've been doing this a while and you're looking at this as a backup or a cheap throw-in for a trip where you don't want to risk your main setup — yeah, that works too. I've thrown this in a bag more than once as a second magnet when I was going somewhere I expected to lose gear to a snag. There's probably a bike locked to something at the bottom of the Thames that has my better magnet attached to it still. That's a separate story. The point is, cheap enough to be expendable — and that has real value sometimes.