An angler walking around a fly shop in their first pair of G3’s is a rite of
passage, one that expresses in no uncertain terms that their trial period with
the sport of fly fishing is over, that it’s time to leave the shore behind and
wade in chest deep.
Before I made the leap I was in my 20s and my wader life was a revolving door
sort of affair. Each year or two I’d buy a pair of cheap, billowing waders and
clunky boots and locomote through the creeks like Neil Armstrong on the moon.
They’d all invariably tear, leak or otherwise fail within a year or two, and I
would be on to the next.
And then one year I took the leap and bought a new daily uniform. But little
did I know that in addition to not leaking, my G3’s would change the way I
fished. It became suddenly easy to clamber over log jams and under barbed wire
fences, to put many more miles into a fishing day. That first pair of G3’s
became like a pair of old jeans, growing so comfortable I wore them all day
and sometimes, when the tent or tarp crapped out, all night as well. Me and my
G3’s roamed further afield, too, branching out from Wisconsin’s Driftless to
Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Poland, Chile, and Labrador. And when I got a new
pair of G3’s some 10 years later, it wasn’t because my first pair had waved
the white flag. I just wanted a fresh set.
And now the next generation of G3 is upon us. To celebrate the 20th
anniversary of their workhorse, SIMMS set out to make the G3 more bomb-proof
than ever. The new G3 wader line features a 7.5% increase in tongue tear
strength, a 23% increase in puncture resistance, and an 84% increase in
pinhole puncture resistance. In addition to battening down all the waderly
hatches, SIMMS improved breathability by a third—all the more reason for a new
generation of maniacal angler to never take these bad boys off.
If you’re still getting new waders every other year, or waddling around your
local trout stream like a cosmonaut on Mars, now’s a good time to consider
transitioning to what just may be the hardest working piece of gear in the
sport. The latest generation of G3 wader, available in both men’s and women’s,
is already hoarding accolades, winning Best of Show, Best Men’s Waders and
Best Women’s Waders at the 2022 International Fly Tackle Dealer Show.
$599