Where Everything Presses Down
Rain shells shed water here. Pack and PFD straps crush the loft underneath. Compressed down is flat down, and flat down is cold — so this zone gets PrimaLoft Gold, which rebounds and keeps working damp.
Down Is the Best Insulator on Earth — Until It Gets Wet.
Down has kept people warm for a century, and nothing beats it for warmth per ounce. But down insulates by trapping air in its clusters, and when those clusters get soaked, they collapse. The air goes. The warmth goes with it.
That matters more than most people realize. Water conducts heat 25 times more efficiently than air — so a wet layer doesn't just stop insulating you, it actively pulls heat off your body.
Now think about where a jacket actually gets wet on the water. It isn't random. It's your wrists in the spray. Your shoulders under a pack strap or a rain shell. Your waist against a wet gunwale. The same places that get compressed, soaked, and abraded first — every single time.
So We Stopped Insulating Jackets Uniformly.
Most puffers are filled with one insulation, distributed evenly, from collar to hem. It's simpler to build. It's also a compromise — you're either carrying synthetic weight where you didn't need it, or carrying down where it's most likely to fail.
REEL DOWN is built the other way around. We mapped the zones where a jacket takes on moisture, pressure, and abrasion during a day on the water, and we insulated those zones differently.
The core layout:
- Body, sleeves, hood — 850 Fill Power HyperDRY® European White Goose Down. Maximum warmth for minimum weight, across the largest surface area of the garment.
- Wrists, hem, and shoulders — PrimaLoft® Gold. High-performance synthetic that holds its loft and its warmth when wet, exactly where wet happens.
The result is a jacket that's lighter than an all-synthetic puffer and more reliable than an all-down one. Not a compromise between two materials — the best case for both.
Three Zones. Three Reasons.
First Contact With the Water
Reaching over the rail, handling a wet net, working a line. Your cuffs soak through before anything else on the jacket does. Here, wet is an inconvenience instead of the end of your warmth.
Leaning Into the Wet
Gunwales, casting decks, wet seats — the waist is where you meet the boat. It's also where spray collects and shell runoff lands. Synthetic takes that all day without losing performance.
Not Just Synthetic. PrimaLoft® Gold.
PrimaLoft is the top of the synthetic insulation category, and Gold is the top of PrimaLoft's range — their series that maximizes performance benefits rather than balancing them. It started as a US Army Research Laboratory project to build a synthetic that could do what down couldn't: stay warm wet. Forty years and 950+ brands later, it's still the benchmark.
Watch It Shed Water
This is PrimaLoft Gold under water contact. The fibers are hydrophobic at the material level — not coated, not treated to be temporarily repellent. Water beads and runs rather than soaking in and collapsing the structure that's doing the insulating.
That's why it's at your cuffs and your hem, and not buried in the middle of your back.
Watch It Come Back
Compression recovery is a material's ability to rebound after being squashed — under a strap, in a dry bag, at the bottom of a boat locker. Insulation only works when it's lofted, so an insulation that doesn't recover is an insulation that's slowly getting colder.
PrimaLoft Gold packs down small and springs back full. It's why the REEL DOWN puffers stuff into their own pocket and come out ready to work.
Where You'll Find It
