MUTUACTOR 800 LB Double-Sided Kit — Both Sides, No Nonsense

I got this out on the Susquehanna last fall — mid-October, one of those days where the light hits the water at exactly the right angle and you convince yourself you're definitely going to pull up something incredible. Spoiler: it was mostly rebar and what I'm pretty confident was a 1980s shopping cart. But here's the thing — I found that shopping cart on the bottom face, dragging along the riverbed while the top face was scanning the water column on the way down. Two chances at everything. That's the whole pitch with double-sided, and it actually holds up.

The swivel is not an afterthought on this one.

I've used kits where they throw in a tiny brass swivel that looks like it belongs on a keychain at a gas station gift shop. This one's beefier — not overkill, but it actually spins under tension, which is the whole point. After an hour of drops off a bridge, my rope was still manageable. That doesn't sound exciting but if you've ever tried to untangle a seriously twisted retrieval line while standing on a concrete ledge over moving water, you understand why it matters.

The magnet itself is pulling rated 800 lbs — and I'll say what I always say about pull ratings, which is that they're measured under lab conditions on a perfectly flat steel plate, so real-world is always going to be less. That's not a knock on this magnet specifically, that's just physics. What I can say is that it grabbed onto a submerged piece of plate steel and held while I hauled it up hand over hand, and it didn't flinch. That's enough for me.

Release is the tradeoff. It always is with double-sided.

When this thing locks onto something solid, getting it off takes work. I keep a pry bar in my bag now — mostly because of magnets like this one, honestly. If you're the kind of person who likes to fish fast and move spots, that extra 30-45 seconds of prying per stuck retrieval is going to add up. It's not a deal-breaker, it's just the physics of running two magnetic faces simultaneously. More surface area on metal means more force holding on. You knew what you were signing up for.

The kit packaging was fine. Nothing memorable. Rope seemed decent — I didn't immediately swap it out, which is my informal test for whether a kit rope is passable. The case it came in has that slightly optimistic plastic hinge that I'd be surprised survives two full seasons of being thrown in the back of a truck, but it's fine for storage at home.

For $34.99 this genuinely makes sense as an upgrade from a basic single-face setup. Someone who's done ten or fifteen sessions, knows how to tie a palomar, isn't scared of a little extra retrieval friction — yeah, this is the move. It's also a legitimately good option for boat fishing where you're dropping straight down and want to grab whatever's directly below you regardless of which face lands first.

I'd buy it again. Already kind of thinking about getting a backup.