Dear Tweeters
My birding vest is in tatters, so it is time to replace it. The tattered one is a Big Pockets Equatorial model. I used to buy cheapo generic vests, but they never have big enough pockets, so I sprang for a Big Pockets. They are not cheap.
Quite a while ago, maybe a year or two ago, I wrote to Big Pockets with several suggestions for improving the vest. I had a back-and-forth exchange with a staff member, and got the impression that the company would be improving the vest.
When I look at the photos of the product on the company website, though, the vest seems identical to the one I have worn out. The water-bottle pockets still appear to be made of delicate mesh. This mesh n my current vest was not nearly strong enough to hold the weight of a water bottle. "A pint's a pound the whole world round," and these pockets cannot hold a pound without shredding.
I also wrote to suggest they eliminate Velcro, except as a backup or as an option. Every Velcro-equipped garment I've ever owned has suffered the same breakdown of the Velcro. Eventually, it stops sticking. Pockets can open on their own, and items be lost. I can never trust a pocket that is closed only with Velcro--not after several instances where I have had to retrace my steps for kilometers to find gloves, lens caps, and such things that had fallen out of a Velcro pocket.
Another suggestion was to eliminate the stitching that makes the left-hand chest pocket into two pockets, one fairly wide, and one designed to hold a pen. Making the pen-holder reduces the size of the pocket, so that certain field notebooks no longer fit in the pocket. Putting Velcro on the chest pocket is also a poor design--some items are tall, and need to protrude from these pockets; Velcro interferes with that.
I believe I forgot to tell Big Pockets this, but I also think they should also make the collar black, or some other dark color, at least on the outside. Binocular and camera straps tend to bleed black dye onto the collar. At first I thought that my vest was suffering from a severe case of "ring around the collar." Those dirty rings! You try scrubbing them out, washing them out--and still, "ring around the collar!" Then I realized that, even with Wisk or Spray-and-Wash, the blackish dye on the collar was not going to come off.
Well. Do any Tweeters have a recommendation for another brand of birding vest--one that still has big pockets, even if it isn't by Big Pockets?
Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch
PS A friend told me that yesterday's pair of Ross's Geese were still at the Samish East Ninety this morning. Happy Migration Count!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20200509/549fccde/attachment.html>