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Recently I was looking at options for carrying a large (eg 1.5L / 50 ounce) plastic bottle. I’m a big thirsty guy and I’ve never really felt that standard 1L Sigg or Nalgene bottles really cut it for me, nor do I feel they offer me any more than a plastic water or soda bottle does for free. When you’ve lost or busted a couple the free ones look like awfully good value, and are easily recycled before they start looking old. Finally, I’ve always got a couple knocking around in the car and will generally buy a full pack when I’m away from home and the tap water isn’t great. I see no advantage in decanting into a more expensive container.
Plenty of bags come with a bottle pouch (for the aforementioned Sigg or Nalgene) tacked onto the side. Carrying a larger bottle and not much else means that the water becomes the main load, so I wanted a bag that recognized that and was configured accordingly.
I decided on a couple of Maxpedition products (there aren’t too many other brands available to us here in Australia) – the 5 x 12 bottle carrier for short bushwalks etc, and the Colossus for when I need to lug a bit more gear. I’ll review the Colossus separately.
The Maxpedition Bottle Carrier does not come with a strap. I ordered their 2″ strap, and was disappointed to find it too short for comfortable carry across the body. At its longest adjustment it is only 50″ / 127cm hook to hook, at its shortest it is 28″ / 71cm (their website claims 54″ and 30″). While I confess I’m a big bloke, even an average guy in modest winter clothing would surely find the same thing. I can think of no good argument for a strap to need to adjust so short, so the lack of additional length seems like an act of total tightwaddery on Maxpedition’s part – not to mention my apparently being ripped off of a couple of inches from their already frugal design. An extra 6″ or so would make all the difference.
The bag itself is typical Maxpedition – sturdy nylon, plenty of PALS webbing, YKK zippers with paracord pulls. It has one main cylindrical compartment, with one admin pocket on the front. It has D rings for a shoulder strap, and a simple 1″ webbing strap running vertically down the back serves as a grab handle and can presumably be used to attach it to PALS on a larger bag. There is also a caribiner for quick attachment.
The admin pocket is a useful size, not huge – you can fit a folding knife and flashlight in there, maybe a mobile phone, certainly a couple of pens, some band-aids, aspirin, insect repellent, whatever small things you like to have with you. Obviously it shares a wall with the main compartment, so if you pack one to bulging then you’ll get less in the other. The entire main compartment is also padded, which provides some insulation for your bottle but also offers protection if you are using the bag for something like a zoom lens. Be aware that a drain grommet and the zip arrangement won’t help to protect the contents from dust or moisture, however.
Which leads to my biggest gripe, and what to me seems like a design choice so poor the manufacturer MUST be aware of it – Maxpedition’s use of a circumferential zipper arrangement to close the main compartment. Zippers are great in straight lines, or anywhere that you can grab the opposite end with the other hand to tension the track out straight. Around a cylinder is neither of those. To make matters even worse, the admin pocket on the front actually forces the cylinder into a kind of D shape, where the zippers now have two additional corners to get around. It is a very poor design in my opinion, and even with both hands takes an enormous amount of faffing around to open and close due to a lack of anything on the bag to grab, other than the strap D-rings (which are just far enough away from the zip track to be of no use whatsoever). It seems to me that a far more intelligent choice would be to replace the zipper with a drawstring & gaiter arrangement on the main compartment (which could be secured around a bottleneck for easy access or closed right up over a camera lens for maximum weatherproofing), and a SRB (or even just a velcro tab) to secure the top flap.
So in all, even though the bag carries exactly what I need, the way it does it is pretty poor and I have to say that MaxP haven’t covered themselves in glory with this or the strap. I’ll have to try and source a longer strap somewhere else, or bodge up some kind of extension for this one, and there’s really nothing I can do about the zippers except to simply not use them.
Disappointed.
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