Have you had a good fishing life?
Fishing happens outdoors, which means sooner or later you get caught in weather you did not plan for. A jacket that sheds rain, wind and spray is worth having.
The problem is that a good fishing jacket is expensive, and the water repellency wears off after a few years anyway. You are then looking at replacing a jacket that is otherwise perfectly fine.
You do not have to. Nikwax brings it back — and below I will show you a way of using it that costs a fraction of the official method.
What Nikwax is
Nikwax is a liquid treatment that restores water repellency to clothing and bags. It is cheap for what it does and it works properly.
There are two bottles, and this is the part people get wrong.
Nikwax Tech Wash (green bottle)
Tech Wash strips the fine residue out of the fabric.
Here is why that matters. When you wash a jacket with ordinary powder or detergent, some of it stays in the fibres after rinsing. You cannot see it, but it sits there and kills the water repellency. Tech Wash removes it.
Nikwax TX.Direct Wash-In (blue bottle)
TX.Direct is the one that puts the water repellency in — jackets, beanies, bags, gloves, socks, all of it.
I used to buy only the blue bottle and wondered why the treatment barely worked. You need both. The blue one cannot do its job until the green one has cleaned the fabric out. That is the single most useful thing in this article.
The official method, and why I stopped using it
The instructions go roughly like this: set the machine to a 20-litre water level, put in the garment and the Tech Wash, run a normal cycle. Then run a second cycle with the TX.Direct. Hang to dry.
It works. My rough feeling is that the repellency holds for a year or two afterwards.
But it uses a lot of product, and the product is not free. Doing several garments this way gets expensive fast. So I worked out a bucket method instead.
My bucket method
1. Run an empty wash first
Zip everything up and run the garments through the machine on their own, with no detergent, to get the loose dirt off.
Do not hang them out to dry. They go into the bucket wet.
My test subjects this time:
A snowboard jacket. I wear it for winter eging. Blue Blood, bought ten years ago, and the repellency is long gone — I treated it about three years back and it has given up since. Splash water on it now and it soaks straight in.
A fishing jacket. Twenty years old. Throw water at it and it drinks it like a towel.
A knitted beanie. This one never had any water repellency to begin with — I wanted to see whether Nikwax could add it from scratch.
2. Wash in Tech Wash (green)
Tech Wash has a sharp smell. Do this in the bathroom with the fan running, or outside.
Fill a big bucket or bait tub with about 15 litres of lukewarm water. That is enough to do around six garments.
Add 300 ml of Tech Wash to the 15 litres.
Put the washed garments in, and for about ten minutes tread on them and work them with your feet. It is not elegant but it is thorough.
Look at the water. That is what came out of clothes I had just put through the washing machine. This is the residue that has been killing your water repellency.
3. Run another empty wash
Back into the machine, no detergent, to rinse the Tech Wash out.
Again, do not hang them out.
4. Treat with TX.Direct (blue)
Same idea, slightly more water: about 20 litres of lukewarm water in the bucket, plus 300 ml of TX.Direct.
Put the garments in and work them with your feet again for about ten minutes.
5. Machine wash with the solution
Tip the garments and the TX.Direct water into the washing machine and run a cycle. Nothing gets wasted.
6. Dry in the shade for two or three days
That is the whole process.
Did it work?
The snowboard jacket, which had repellency once and lost it, has it back.
The twenty-year-old fishing jacket that drank water like a towel now beads it.
And the beanie, which never had water repellency at all, has it now. That is the result that surprised me most — Nikwax does not only restore repellency, it can add it to fabric that never had any.
Which opens up something worth knowing: this jacket came from a second-hand shop for about two dollars. Two dollars, plus a turn in the bucket, and it is a waterproof fishing jacket.
Summary
Fishing gear needs to shed water. On a wet, windy day it is the difference between staying out and going home.
Nikwax lasts considerably longer than a spray-on waterproofer, and it brings dead garments back rather than just topping up live ones. Use both bottles — green first to strip the residue, blue second to add the repellency — and the bucket method keeps the cost down when you have several things to do at once.
One side effect I should warn you about. Treat your gear my way, and your feet become water repellent too.
