When a pro-staff angler walks away from a brand he has built two seasons of content around, the goodbye video is rarely the warmest one in the channel's archive. The On Point Adventures resignation video on Aeroo is. Gloves-off, but warm.
"This is probably one of the toughest videos I'm ever probably going to produce or have produced," he said at the top of the 17-minute farewell. "And that is around me, of course, leaving Team Aeroo, or I guess leaving the pro team. Which was a huge decision. But what that brings for you is now I can give you a completely unbiased, gloves-off perspective of Aeroo and what the company was really, really like to deal with."
Fishing-drone buyers asking the obvious question - is the Aeroo Pro any good - now have a long-form answer from someone with no commercial reason to flatter the product.
On build quality, the verdict was generous. "My personal opinion is these are a sub-$2,000 drone. So you're not going to be expecting the most premium quality drones in the world," he said. "But what I can say about the overall build quality of these drones for the price you pay is pretty bloody good. We're talking a drone that can carry kilo payloads, can fly in 50km/h winds. This particular drone here has been dropped. It has flown into lines. It has been toppled off the top of tables on the beach. It has snapped propellers. I have really probably put this drone through more than what it should have been. And yet, it still starts up and flies exactly as it should."
The one persistent design weakness he flagged was the gimbal. "There was a bit too much tolerance, in my opinion, for where I fish. The sand is exceptionally fine and it gets into everything, which has jammed up my gimbal on several occasions, but that's been fixed with giving it a quick brush and away it goes."
On flight reliability against the obvious benchmark - DJI - he split the verdict cleanly. "The DJIs, granted, are 250g less on the payload, but in terms of flying this next to my Mavic Pro, as well as my Phantom that I've had, this eats them for breakfast," he said. "The quality of it is on par, but where I think the DJI did exceed and excel over this was certainly the return to home, because these drones, if you want something that's going to land on a dime, they're not going to do it. They're 2 to 3 metres off every time. DJIs will land on a 50 cent piece. These will not. However, everything else, these will actually do better."
The section on customer service is the one Aeroo will probably be happiest about. He addressed the social-media chorus directly. "In my time dealing with Aeroo, I started to get a bit nervous when I'd watch the Aeroo Facebook page and I'd see all these people complaining about 'I can't get tech support'. So I wanted to see firsthand whether or not this was true." His test, in the form of a 10-person case study made up of his mates who bought the drone after he flew it, was decisive. "It was so lightning fast and so professional, the replies that it gave me a fantastic piece of mind as a pro angler that everything was getting done correctly."
The most newsworthy part of the video, though, is the why. The two reasons On Point Adventures gave for resigning are unrelated and revealing.
The first was audience. "I didn't feel that my audience really wanted to watch too much drone content," he said. "We released a fair whack of drone content both in short format and long format, and the views simply weren't there. I felt I couldn't deliver any more the amount of productivity or dedication to this product that I believe it personally deserves. There's other content creators out there that truly deserve an Aeroo endorsement more than me."
The second was Western Australia's demersal fishing ban - a policy story that has dominated WA fishing discussion for months. "Where I live, it is absolutely no secret that we cop terrible weather a lot of the time. And our beautiful government over here in Western Australia has introduced a demersal ban, which means we cannot chase Jew fish, snapper, baldchin, black ass, etc. off the boat. So we are now land-based only for those species," he said. "What that means is I need to also now have the facilities of a waterproof drone. So I can fly in light rain, I can fly in heavy rain, I can fly it when I need to without risking damaging it. And that wouldn't be very fair on the Aeroo brand if I was flying another product when they put so much time and effort into me."
For drone-fishing buyers, the takeaway is layered. The Aeroo Pro reads, on this independent review, as a good-value heavy-lift drone with a soft gimbal in fine sand and a return-to-home you should never trust to a 50-cent landing. For the WA fishing scene, the same video is a small case study in how a single state-government policy is reshaping the gear conversations of pro anglers who have to fish, increasingly, when the weather decides rather than when they do.
