Spring Time Fly Fishing Gear Tune-Up – Part 3 – Staying Hooked

If you have ever experienced a day where the fish were hitting the fly but you had problems setting the hook, then it is likely that the hook you were using needed a few good strokes across a sharpening stone. It can be quite frustrating to know that you have tied the right fly pattern to the end of your line, but every hit comes with only fleeting joy because that hook simply won’t set.

Do yourself a favor and invest in a hook sharpener. You can purchase a sharpener that will fit neatly inside your vest or shirt pocket for just a few dollars. Believe me, those few dollars will pay off handsomely in solid hook sets.

It’s pretty easy to take the edge off the point of a hook. If you have ever had the hook strike against a tree branch on a back cast, or smack against a rock, you’ve probably dulled your hook. Either tie on a new fly soon, or simply hone that point with a few strokes from the sharpener.

To sharpen the hook, hold it point facing toward you, and simply angle the sharpener, making 3 or 4 strokes. Turn the hook about 90 degrees and again, 3 or 4 strokes should be fine. Repeat this step two more times, and you should have a hook that will set nicely.

There are a couple of other things worth thinking about when you inspect your hooks this spring. Let me relate a frustrating experience I once had:

Last year, while fishing for some very nice smallmouth bass, I tied on a Muddler Minnow. Sure as I expected, it caught the interest of a nice fish. I felt that tell tale tug and then heard the splash of a bass beginning its fight as the hook set. Well, the fight was on, but only for a few seconds. My first thought was that it was just one of those times when I hadn’t set the hook well. I didn’t even bother to check the fly – I was too excited about the prospect of enticing another bass to hit the muddler.

The next cast, the same thing happened, only this time, I could feel the fly come loose in a weird kind of way. I decided to change flies, and when I went to remove the fly on my line, I discovered that the whole point of the fly was missing. Because I was fishing some very fast water flowing over a lot of rocks, I initially figured I had been fishing with a defective hook that broke when it struck a rock.

I tied on a second Muddler. As it drifted down through the rapids, I again had that excitement of ‘fish on!’ as another nice smallie took the fly. The excitement was short-lived for a second time as once again I discovered that the point had broken off.

I went through about 5 of these muddler minnows, all with the same experience. It was only a bit later that I realized that what had probably happened was that whoever had tied up those flies had used way too much pressure on the hook in the vice, and it had weakened it at the bend enough that the point simply broke off every time a fish hit the fly.

The moral of the story is make sure you don’t over tighten that vice when you’re tying up fly patterns for the coming season!

There is another way you can cause your hook to weaken and possibly break off at inopportune times, and that is by improper removal of the barb. Often, I have seen anglers remove the barb by placing a pair of needlenose pliers across the point, and squeezing down over the barb. A better way to do this is to have the point of the hook between the pliers, with the pliers extending beyond the barb before squeezing down and removing the barb. You’ll spread the pressure over the length of the point rather than risking weakening a smaller area of the hook.