Jonard MagneTriever MRS-24 — The $21 Starter That Actually Makes Sense

My first real magnet fishing setup cost me around $70 when I put it all together — magnet, rope, gloves, a carabiner I already had sitting in a drawer from a camping trip years ago. That's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but it's also not nothing when you're not sure yet if you're going to care about this six weeks from now.

The MagneTriever is for the person who isn't sure yet.

It telescopes out — you extend it, dip the magnet end into water or poke it under a dock, and see what sticks. That's it. There's no rope to tie, no knot to mess up, no 220-pound pull force to worry about. It's the magnet fishing equivalent of borrowing someone's rod before you buy your own.

I took one of these out to a spot under a footbridge near a park — the kind of place where generations of kids have dropped bikes, fishing lures, and whatever else kids drop into shallow water. The MagneTriever pulled up a handful of washers, something that used to be a padlock (presumably sitting in about two feet of murky water since sometime around 2003), and a handful of things I genuinely could not identify. Not a bad afternoon for a Tuesday.

Here's the thing though — and I want to be straight about this — if you already know you like magnet fishing, this isn't the tool you want. The telescoping reach is limited. You can't throw it. You can't drag a creek bottom from a bridge. It's a dipping tool, not a hunting tool, and the pull force isn't going to haul up anything serious.

It's also made of plastic. Not in a bad way, just in a twenty-dollar-tool way.

For a kid? It's kind of perfect. They can poke around in the shallows at a lakeside park without you worrying about them launching a rope off a railing. The whole thing is manageable — the size, the weight, the concept. My nephew spent forty-five minutes at the edge of a retention pond with one of these and came away absolutely convinced he'd found buried treasure. (He found a bottle cap and part of a drain cover. But the conviction was real.)

I wouldn't call the magnet weak, exactly. It picks up small metal stuff just fine. But if you're hoping to drag up anything with real mass — old tools, padlocks, the stuff that makes magnet fishing feel genuinely exciting — you're going to outgrow this thing fast. Like, within a trip or two fast.

That's not a knock. That's just what it is.

The price is what makes it work as a recommendation. At $21.27 you're not gambling much. If you hand this to a curious ten-year-old and they lose interest after one afternoon, you're not out $75. And if they come back from that afternoon completely obsessed — which, in my experience, is about 50/50 — now you know it's worth setting them up properly.