This is a hilarious item to review but I clicked the post and it was actually pretty good.

I personally don’t lose that many balls over the season and more often than not I am retiring them after 2 or 3 rounds of use, but I totally understand there are some bad golfers out there who lose balls in the water. At that point, they may want to consider playing cheaper balls until their skill level improves, therefore they won’t have to worry about losing balls.

Guys, who & how do you actually test these ball retrievers? Seriously come out a day or two with me when I’m bull hunting and you’ll see the complete fallacy of your most wanted list. I have found more balls over the past 12 years than 99% of the people out there. The gotcha apparatus you continue to promote is a COMPLETE waste of time (mine broke within 2 years). The best one continues to be the JP lann extendable model w/ the orange cup at the end. All these other devices with the spring or other contraptions are just a piece of metal waiting to break. Sure, the gotcha folds down real small but who cares. If I’m out ball retrieving, I’m looking for balls, not looking to have a cute little device in my golf bag. And if I’m playing a real round for score, don’t you dare pull out a little ball retriever & slow me down by looking for balls doing a round.

And folks, I love to be able to make a comment without a thousand pop-up ads coming up constantly.

Ik heb een “balkenvanger “ op 2 wieltjes dat bij elkaar gehouden wordt door een een middenstuk , rol ermee over de grond en kan 4 ballen tegelijk pakken , heeft dan ook nog eens een lang rijk vermogen

I have shagged well over 15000 golf balls and the best ones are the ones that have a little basket at the end work on embedded balls water balls those hoop ones never work on an embedded ball
I think I have more experience retrieving lost balls than any of your tests and I’m still using my original retriever

I have a retreiver that was given to me at a garage sale. Been in my bag ever since. It,s shaft is aluminum, with the end being kind of square, made of metal, loosely, so the ball can get trapped in the cage. At least 15 ft. long extended.. Saved me a few balls from a watery grave…

I won an I Gotcha a long time ago and it still works fine at most courses… other than mine! With large rocks on the bottom of our ponds, the I Gotcha can’t trap the ball. I like that it fits inside the pocket of my bag though.

I’m another disappointed I Gotcha retriever owner who’s seen multiple problems with the ball retrievers. (I’ve owned 3 of them over the years.) I’ve had the extension rods rust together so tight that you can’t extend the retriever, the plastic ring comes loose, the spring fails, you can’t trigger the ring to flip to capture the ball. The retriever looks like stainless stell but it’s not, which is why the rust is a problem, especially if y ou’re near the coast where there’s salt water. The retrievers have the potential to be the best retrievers but the problems are well known and the manufacturer has made no significant changes to eliminate them. Given the prices charged, stay away!

There is a better way to keep balls from getting lost AND speed up play. Put a passive RFID in the middle of the ball and let your cell phone ping where it is. There are many a times I have “lost” a ball over a small hill in tall grass or under leaves in the fall. We all saw where it went but still took 5+ minutes to find it, of give up and drop and hit another.

Plenty of water here in Puerto Rico, so I’ve been thinking about getting a BR. My buddy has one and it’s worked well when it’s been needed AND the ball has been recoverable. Therein lies the rub: recoverable.

But, I didn’t expect these things to be so expensive. At $60 for the I GOTCHA, I would have to recover at least 15 balls just to break even. Then again, my dozens are in the $35 range (last time I bought, which was about a year ago), so I’d need to recover 20 balls just to break even. And since not every wayward ball is retrievable – let’s say half of them are recoverable (e.g. not in deep water or lost in the woods) – I’d have to lose 40 balls (!) for the I GOTCHA (or any similarly-priced BR) just to break even.

Yes, I do understand that I can recover *other* balls as well, even if I can’t recover mine, but I don’t play “found” balls, so that won’t do me much good (if any).

I love these tests. But what this one taught me is that ball retrievers don’t pass my cost/benefit analysis.

Should be easy to test water balls. Throw a half dozen balls in a 5 gallon bucket. Leave them for a year. Then test against the other half dozen with an Iron Byron and Trackman..

I have had retrievers similar to your favorite ‘Gotcha” . I found it worked pretty well, but it is more fragile than others on the market. The plastic is pretty thin, and I broke it when the device was simply dropped on the ground if it lands head first. Also, the inner disc can start popping out of the outer disc over time. Then, their is the spring which can fail or jump out and get lost.

I prefer a fixed head or Callaway’s with the drop down arm mechanism.

I’ve had several I Gotcha retrievers , all have failed , either the spring mechanism stopped working, or the plastic ring broke. Carefully stored in my cart bag, and not abused. The best one is the search and rescue two ball which you didn’t review , likely because they’ve been unavailable for some time now due to manufacturing delays. They’re worth waiting for.

Cool, now that we have done a review on retrievers let’s get one on “waterlogged” balls and used golf balls from lostgolfballs. Buying used/cleaned golf balls from their top two tiers is not the same as a refurbished ball. Since the introduction of solid core golf balls, I find it hard to believe that you lose significant distance/spin change from a golf ball that has been underwater for 6 months. Show me the data!