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03/01/14

bonefishing hawaii:

a lot can happen in a few seconds.


so after a better than average winter, february left us with a pretty brutal week of fishing.  for me, it was the toughest two days on the water in a long long time.  it was a friendly reminder from the higher ups of just who exactly is in charge.


on wednesday i took the trusty 691-4 sage method out for a spin around the flat.  the winds were out of the north west and had a little chill in it.  not a good thing.  visibility was good.  good enough to see that there weren’t any fish around.  i saw a total of six fish which in my book is no different than seeing none.  out of these six i had a decent shot at one of them.  i spotted the fish out of the corner of my eye.  it was barely moving toward me.  i put the fly about four feet in front of it.  the fish had absolutely no reaction either way to the fly landing in it’s path.  the bone just kept on inching along.  it was barely moving.  it was decision time, force a yeah or neigh reaction out of the fish by moving the fly or just let it sit and see how the whole thing plays out.  in that instant i chose the latter.  why?  i could not tell you because i have absolutely no idea.


the fish kept coming very slowly until it was right at the spot where i knew my fly was.  it may have stopped over my fly but it was moving so slowly all along that i couldn’t tell.  there were no signs that the fish even knew my fly was there.  there were no slot machine bells going off in my head screaming at me, “it ate it!!!  it ate it!!!”  there was nothing but a calm and peaceful silence with the fish in front of me as well as in my mind.  i would have to “jedi knight” it.  the jedi knight is what i call those situations when sight fishing for bones where you have absolutely no clues as to whether or not the fish has the fly in it’s mouth except for the “force”.  this force somehow instantaneously takes in every aspect of the entire situation and rules out every other possible outcome except for the one where the fish has the fly in its mouth.  subconscious, instinct, experience, gut feeling, i don’t know what it is but it works.  i heard the faithful words of the “jedi knight” calmly enter my mind and whisper to my conscious,

 

“it’s gotta have it.”


i strip set the hook and for the first time in the entire encounter got a recognizable reaction.  a little gill flare as the bone tried to expel the foreign creature (that bit back) from it’s mouth.

i was now on to the next dilemma.  i knew the immediate area that i hooked the fish at.  it was sketchy for landing fish.  i had an idea of the size of the fish i had hooked.  it was a little more than a rat maybe five to seven pounds somewhere in there.  i knew my gear and how i could land this fish.  i knew how much pressure to apply and when to apply it as well as when to back off.  what i didn’t know was how well i had hooked the fish.  the “jedi knight”  will often tell you when to set the hook on a fish but rarely, if ever, let’s you know how well you’ve hooked it.  given the situation, i had no choice.  i laid into the fish max pressure and the tug of war for the line in my stripping basket began.

before the point at which i felt that i had broken the bone and kept it from obtaining it’s top, just hang on, speed, the line went limp.  what turned out to be my one and only fish that day was gone.  i stripped in my line and found the fish had bent out the hook and the one unknown was now known... the fish was not hooked well.

now when most peeps out there encounter this situation, the blame for the entire undesired outcome almost always lands squarely on the hook.  in actuality it is more often than not how well the hook is set that is the real culprit.  a simple experiment can prove this or at least give hook blamers a little something more to think about.  so let’s open our minds for a few minutes and give it a try shall we?


step 1.  get a hook.  any hook will do but preferably one that can be bent relatively easily.  better yet get one that you no longer use because it has failed before.  avoid using a super heavy wire hook unless you were born with a gorilla strength gene in your genome. tie a strong line to it with a good knot.


step 2.  stick that hook on something solid like the side of a table and pull against it.  what happens?  the hook bends out and, chances are, pretty easily.


step 3.  now tie on another hook of the same style as the first one.  find a dowel or pencil or whatever that just fits in the bend of the hook.  hold the dowel and pull.  all of a sudden that weak hook is pretty damn strong.


now while this little experiment may not be astrophysics or bill nye the science guy stuff, it does illustrate a key factor in the whole hook bend out scenario that is often overlooked.  a hook that is not set so that the pressure is applied to the bend is the cause of hooks bending out.  not necessarily the hook itself.


of course a thicker wire heavier hook will not bend nearly as easily as a thin wired hook, so why not just use the most gorilla thick wire hook available?  there is another component to this story.  once again we are faced with our old life friend the trade off.  while a thick wired hook would indeed not bend as easily if it is not set well as a thinner wire hook will, it is also much harder to get that thick wire hook to penetrate to the bend in a fish mouth.  sharpening the point of the hook definitely helps for penetration purposes and you should keep your hook points sharp regardless of what kind of hook is being used.  think of this though.   imagine that you have a hypodermic needle and a nail that has a tip that is as sharp as the needle.  which would you rather stick in your arm if you had to choose one and why.  i don’t know about you, but i’d have to go with the hypo needle myself.


once again what works “best” all depends on who you ask.  everyone falls somewhere between the extremes.  i personally land on the side of a lighter wire hook opting for penetration over brute strength.  even so i’ve used just about every hook on this spectrum and can’t really say that in the long run i’ve been able to land more fish with a light wired hook compared to a heavy wire hook.  light wire hooks that are not set well will most certainly bend out easier.  heavy wire hooks, though being less susceptible to bending out, lose fish in a number of other ways due to the thickness of the wire.  the one thing i will guarantee is that no matter what hook you end up using, you will still lose fish whether it is because the hook bent out or just fell out.  that’s just the way it is.  i hope after reading this, though, you won’t be so hard on the poor hook itself and cut it a little slack the next time one fails.


well that’s it.  yep.  no storybook ending.  no “i caught a few more later” fish pics.  we don’t live in fairy tale fishing video or glossy lodge advertisement land here.  that was it.  doug saw a bit more fish where he was than i did.  he hooked two, but also lost both of them (not via hook bend out but straight up cut off).  that was it.  sometimes like that... good times.

 

clay.



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