Hooking and Landing Basics

Since some people enjoyed my chapter on casting basics, I'll post another chapter. I'll have to do it in pieces, so bear with me. As before, if anybody sees anything I have wrong, please let me know and I'll correct it. And feel free to jump in with alternatives or clarification. Thanks!

Part 1

Wham! A trout strikes your fly and is hooked! Your eyes widen, your grin starts, your adrenaline flows and, chances are, you yell out something ? even if there is nobody within hearing distance. Congratulations! Enjoy the moment. It is an experience that will always thrill you, even after years of fly fishing and thousands of strikes.

Hooking up with a trout
Chances are that most of the fish you catch in your early days will be fish that hooked themselves. They bit on your fly and, with their mouths closed, moved away from you. This sunk your fly?s hook into their mouth.

As you get better, you will learn not to rely on the fish hooking itself. You will be the one who sinks the hook into the fish?s mouth, which is called ?setting the hook?. You?ll do this when you see the fish take the fly at the surface of the water. If you are fishing a sinking fly and using a strike indicator, you?ll do this when you see your strike indicator pause or move in a way that is not explained by the flow of the surface water. And, if you feel a tug on your line, it might be a fish that has bitten your fly, but has not yet been hooked.

The amount of effort it takes to set the hook depends on the distance between your rod tip and the fly, and on whether there is any slack in that length. The longer the line out and the more the slack, the more effort it will require to set the hook.

Keep in mind, though, that once the fish?s mouth is closed, your fly is in an area that is seldom larger than a teaspoon. You don?t have to move that fly very far to set the hook. You may want to practice your hook setting move by putting your fly in a spoon to see just how little rod tip movement it takes to pull your fly from the spoon.

If you only have 20 feet of tight line out, the setting motion is done with just a small wrist movementto move your rod tip in a direction away from the fly. If your fly is upstream from you, this can be an upward wrist movementand, thus, your rod tip. If the fly is downstream, many people prefer a sideways wrist movement.


If you have a long distance of line out and/or there is slack in the line, you may have to put your elbow into the hook setting motion. You are trying to get your fly to move the same small distance in the fish?s mouth, but it takes more movement of your rod tip to get the fly to go that distance.

The hook setting move should be as fast as your reflexes will allow when fishing nymphs. With nymphs the fish may have simply sipped in the fly and, once realizing that this thing doesn?t taste or feel like a bug, done the trout equivalent of spitting it out. Don?t do a huge yank of the fly. If the trout is in the process of spitting your fly, a big yank will pull the fly out of its mouth. A more gentle setting motion may enable the hook to sink into the trout before it has left the trout?s open mouth.

With a dry fly you?ll hook more fish if you pause for a second or two after the strike before setting the hook. This allows the trout to bite on the fly, turn, and head back down into the water, increasing the chance that your hook will catch in its mouth when you move the rod tip to set the hook.

Part 2

So, how big is this guy?
Whether the trout hooks itself or you set the hook, the initial feeling will be a “wham”. Your fly will suddenly be attached to an animal that is mostly muscle. I’ve found that the “wham” can happen even with little fish. You can get the brief feel of something big when setting a sinking fly hook on a little guy, but you may find yourself launching a 5-inch trout into the air if you set your hook too aggressively.

You’ll be able to tell very soon if you have a little guy or a big guy on your hook. The little guy will feel like a wiggle on the end of your line as you reel him in. The big guy will let you know he has some muscles and heft. Indeed, that big guy may well have enough power to snap your tippet or unravel a poorly tied knot. Your tactics will change as soon as you have made the little guy versus big guy determination.

The objective with both fish is to get them to your net as soon as you can, without letting them throw the hook, snag your line on a rock or tree branch, or break your tippet.

That sense of urgency is based on two facts. The longer the fish has to work things out, the more likely it is going to find a way to get off your hook. More importantly, the fighting tires the fish and causes it to build up acids in its bloodstream. These stresses can cause the fish to die, even if you are careful in handling it and release it gently to the water. As a catch-and-release fisher, you want to net it, but also to have the fish to survive after release.

There’s a reason for your rod’s taper
Now that I have you visualizing a hooked fish on the end of your line, I hate to take you away to an explanation of how your rod works. I must, though, or you won’t understand the best way to get that hooked fish into your net.

Your rod is thickest and least flexible at the lower end. As it tapers to its thinnest diameter at your rod tip, it becomes more flexible. You can control the overall flexibility of your rod, and the amount of pressure it is putting on the fish –and your tippet. You do this by changing the angle of the rod tip to the direction of the fish, vertically or horizontally.

When your rod is pointed at a 45-degree angle away from the fish, it is bending fairly low on the rod and you are typically putting the maximum pressure on the fish that your rod was designed to give. As you change the angle to point increasingly towards the fish, you are increasingly reducing the rod’s pressure on the fish.

If you point your rod directly towards the fish you have a choice of doing two things. If you don’t have the line clamped with your rod hand index finger, your rod is putting absolutely no pressure on the fish. The only pressure is coming from your reel’s drag. If you have the line clamped, however, you are putting the most pressure on the fish that you can, but the rod is offering no flexibility to cushion any shock the fish may put on your line. Without the rod’s flexibility, you stand a pretty good chance of having the fish break your tippet if it makes a lunge before you can release the line.

As you change the angle from 45-degrees to pointing at a 90-dgree angle away from the fish, you are again reducing the amount of pressure your rod is putting on the fish. The rod will begin to bend more towards the tip, where it is most flexible. Though it is not putting much pressure on the fish at the 90-degree angle, your rod is acting as a shock absorber for your tippet.

If you point your rod at more than a 90-degree angle from the fish, it could be argued that you are not fishing – you are trying to break your rod. If the fish can pull your rod tip so it is pointing perpendicularly away from your rod that is generally fine. Having the rod tip point down parallel to your rod is bad. If you hold your rod so that the tip ends up pointing down towards the reel, there is a good chance you will break your rod, or damage it so that the next fish breaks it.

Part 3

Back to the Chase
I think of the act of getting a fish to my net as a two-stage process. Stage one is ?getting the fish on my reel? -- eliminating all slack line between my reel and the hooked fish. Stage two is fighting the fish and bringing it to my net.

Fly fishers have different favorite techniques for both stages. Some never raise their rods at more than a 45-degree angle from the water, while others prefer to work the fish with the rod pointed at a 60 to 90-degree angle. Some like to move their rods vertically, while others keep the rod tip fairly low and use a sideways motion of the rod tip to fight the fish. I?ll describe my favorite approach, but also give you some alternatives you may want to try.

I was surprised when I learned that some fly fishers never get small fish on their reel; they just strip them in by hand. I?d like to get you in the habit of getting all fish on your reel. You have the most control and the least chance of having a fish break off after you have it on your reel. I believe that it is better to have one standard general approach to practice and make instinctive than to have different approaches for small fish and big fish.

Getting the fish on the reel
As soon as the fish realizes it has been hooked and is feeling the pull of your line it will react to a sensation that it definitely does not enjoy. The initial reaction is to get away from that pull, so it will usually run away from the direction of the pull.

The fish is at its strongest at this point. If it is a big guy, it has the ability to put a strong enough yank on your lines to snap the tippet or untie any knots that are not strong enough to hold. Tippet material is surprisingly capable of withstanding a steady pull. But, the thinner it is, the more likely it is to break when given a strong yank.

The way I look at it, immediately after I have hooked a fish I am not trying to fight it. I?m simply trying to stay connected to it by keeping the hook embedded. If I give it to much slack, it might be able to shake the fly loose. If I pressure it too much, it might break off.

Since a hook-up leads me to ?stay connected? mode, not immediate fighting mode, I prefer a vertical rod approach at the start. Here?s how you do that.

As soon as you have the fish hooked, release most of the pressure you are using to clamp the fly line with your index finger. You want enough pressure to keep some tension in the line between you and the fish, but also for the fish to be able to pull out line if it wishes to do so. This also allows you to move your rod tip away from the fish without moving the fish. Trying to pull the fish back towards you while it is trying to swim away from you puts too much pressure on your tippet and risks a break.

Quickly point your rod tip straight up at an 80 to 90-degree angle to the fish. By having your rod tip pointing straight up, all of the pressure is on the end of your rod, where it is most flexible. The rod tip takes the strain at the point where it puts the least amount of tension on the tippet. It is putting enough tension on the line to keep the hook embedded, but it also is acting as a shock absorber if the fish gives your tippet a yank.

Some people extend their arms at this point, holding the rod above their head as they point the rod vertically. This lifts all or most of the fly line from the water. It eliminates any additional pressure being put on the tippet by the fly line?s resistance to being dragged through the water and may reduce the ability of a big fish to break your tippet. Other people find this ?rod over the head? technique awkward and think it unnecessary.

At this early stage, while the fish is still feeling strong and feisty, you should be willing to let the fish pull line out and swim away from you if it wants to. A notable exception is that you should not be willing to allow the fish to take out much line if it is heading towards tree branches or some other location where it can snag your line. Also, if it about to go downstream into some very fast water where the force of the current might help the fish to snap your tippet. In situations like these, clamp your line down and try to steer the fish away from the danger spot.

Now eliminate any slack in the fly line between your rod hand index finger and your reel. The best way to do this is to slip the line under your rod hand?s little finger, or between your little finger and its neighboring finger, so that you can put a little tension on this part of the line as you reel in any slack. The tension you apply with your little finger helps the line to wind tightly onto the reel.

I?ll admit that I fell into starting out with a vertical rod because I was having too many trout break off in my early days. The knots I was tying were not as inherently strong as the ones shown in this book and I probably was not tying them well. So I needed a technique that would keep the hook embedded, but not put too much pressure on the fish when it was freshly hooked and feeling strong.

There are others who are more confident in the strength of their tippets and knots than I am and use more aggressive techniques. Many begin with their rods pointed at about a 45-degree angle to the fish, and get the fish on the reel from this angle. If the fish does a strong run at the start, they will point the rod tip directly at the fish, loosen their rod hand?s clamp on the fly line, and let the fish simply pull out as much line as it wants

Over time, practice with hooked fish in the water will show you which technique is best for you. And, hot darn, is this practice fun!

Either of these techniques leads you to the same point. You now have the fish on the reel and you are ready to begin fighting it.

Part 4
Fighting fish
Once you have a trout on the reel, lower your rod tip to 45- 60 degrees and begin actively fighting the fish. The fish will now be working against the flexibility of your rod. The more it pulls to flex your rod, the greater the pressure the rod puts against it.

With a small trout, the pulling against the pressure of your rod will almost immediately tire it out or overwhelm it, so you can just reel it in. This small fish doesn’t have the strength to break your tippet. Don’t play with it. Just reel it in and release it so it can grow up to be a big guy some day.

Having a hooked fish on your line, even a small one, is fun and shows that you have successfully managed to fool a fish into taking your fly. There’s a terrible temptation to extend the fight. Don’t give in to this temptation! If you overtire the fish, you are probably condemning it to a slow death after you release it. And anybody who sees you spend too much time fighting a small fish is going to think of you as a jerk, not as a successful and knowledgeable fly fisher.

With a big fish, the time to tire it out is longer and any attempt to reel it in quickly could snap your tippet. You need to let bigger fish tire themselves out by pulling against your rod long enough, but not hard enough to snap your line. You do this with the drag on your reel. Remember, you can add extra drag by pressing the palm of your stripping hand against the edge of the reel spool, making it more difficult for the fish to pull line off the reel. Your ideal is to keep the line tight, but not too tight. You’ll learn this with practice.

With a big fish, don’t try to keep every bit of line that you have on your reel remaining on your reel. When the line threatens to become too tight, let the fish pull line off your reel, which is called “letting the fish run”. When the fish ends its run, start retrieving line again. Eventually, you will be able to bring the fish to your net without it ever being able to put enough pressure on the tippet to snap it.

Throughout this process, use your rod to steer the fish. If it is trying to run for an area or obstacle where it thinks it can snag your tippet and break it off, use the pressure from your rod to steer it away from this area. Remember you are not trying to stop the fish from reaching this area by making it totally impossible, you are just trying to prevent the fish from reaching this are by applying pressure that makes it easier for him to head in a different direction. You are steering him, not stopping him.

If the fish is in moving water, try to steer him sideways into an angle that will make him use more energy fighting the current. Remember he is streamlined to point directly into the current and has to work harder if his body is angled away from it. Make the current work in your favor during the fight as you try to tire him out.

At the start of the fight, I like to have the fish fighting against the upper half of my rod. Any lunges it makes are less likely to break my rod if it is bending near the tip

As the fish begins to tire, point your rod tip to more like 45-degrees away from the fish. This will cause the rod to take more of the pull from the fish lower on the rod, where it is stronger and harder to flex, putting more pressure on the fish.

A good technique from here is to “pump the fish”. Point the rod more towards the fish, reel in the line to make it tight, pull the rod tip back towards 45-degrees. Repeat this as you work to reel the fish within netting distance.

For most trout it doesn’t make much difference if they choose to run downstream or upstream. If you are hook a big trout with lots of fighting power, though, it is to your advantage if it is running upstream. That way it is fighting both your rod and the current instead of having the current add power to its fight and, thus, pressure on your tippet.

If you have hooked a really big and powerful fish, and if it is safe and easy to do, try moving downstream while keeping tension on the line with your reel and rod. Once you are downstream of the trout, it will usually begin running upstream to get away from your line. I’m not a good wader so I generally don’t do this unless I can get on the bank and walk downstream. Otherwise I worry about tripping and falling while my attention is on the fish, not on where my feet are going. I’d rather have the trout break off than to fall in the water.

Sometimes you can trick a big fish into turning around and running upstream. You do this by giving the fish lots of slack so that it is no longer feeling pressure from the rod. With no pull from the rod, it may turn back upstream. The risk here is that it might also use the slack to throw your fly loose from its mouth, but there is generally less risk of this than there is of breaking your tippet if the fish can get downstream into some really fast water.

If the trout leaps from the water, briefly point your rod tip directly towards it to give it some slack. That slack might allow the trout to shake off your fly but, if you don’t give it a brief bit of slack, the tug on your line as the fish falls back into the water can snap your tippet. Again, better to take the chance on the hook holding than on your tippet’s strength.

Reel it closer to you as it tires. With a big fish, it sometimes helps to lower the rod tip until it is almost parallel to the water and point it at an angle about “2 hours” horizontally away from the fish. This has the effect of pulling the fish through the water towards you, which they resist less than being pulled upwards toward the surface.

Part 5
The Net
Once you have the fish reeled in to within netting distance, grab your net in your stripping hand and place it in the water in such a way that your hand also gets wet. Fish have slime covering their body and this slime is important to their ability to resist injuries and infections. A wet hand and net touching the fish reduces the degree that you will remove this slime from the fish.

If the fish is still feeling strong enough to keep its head pointing down in the water as it approaches your net, there is a good chance that it will bolt away from your net as soon as it sees it. If you are able to lift the fish?s head slightly out of the water, though, it is probably tired enough to net easily.

Guide the fish over your net. Be careful not to bend your rod into a total U while you are doing this or it may break. I find it easier to guide the fish into the net by pointing the rod parallel to the water and then extending my arm and pointing the rod behind me than it is to pull the fish toward the net by raising my rod tip vertically.

Once you have the fish over the net, raise the net so that the trout is trapped in the mesh, but its gills are still in the water. The less time it spends with its gills out of the water, the greater its chances for survival. It is best if you can do the hook removal and release without ever taking the fish from the water. I?ll admit, though, that I usually lift the fish briefly from the water so I can see and admire its colors.

Catch & Release
Now it gets a bit tricky. You have three things you need to do ?hold the net, hold the rod, and remove the hook from the fish --but you only have two hands.

Get your rod out of your rod hand. If you are close to the shore, you might just lay your rod on the shore. If not, tuck your rod under the armpit of your stripping hand. Switch the net handle to your rod hand and, with your hand outside of the net?s mesh, gently grasp the trout with your stripping hand. Having the cloth net between your hand and the trout helps both your grip and the future health of the trout. Be careful not to squeeze the fish, especially at its delicate gill area.

Once you have the trout firmly but gently grasped in your stripping hand, let go of the net handle. Grab your forceps or release tool with your rod hand and use it to remove the hook from the fish. Depending on where the hook is embedded, it may be easier to just use your fingers to remove the hook.

Most hooks tend to come out easily if you can reach them, especially if you have de-barbed the hook. (More on de-barbing later.) In my experience, the exception is a hook caught in the bony area at the corner of the fish?s mouth, where hooks can be hard to pull out.

Be careful not to inflict any more damage to the trout than necessary, but also be fast-- especially if you have taken the fish from the water to remove the hook. If you are having difficulty and taking too long, return the fish to the water and allow it to breathe for a short time before trying again.

If the fish is wiggling too much for you to grasp the hook, try turning the trout belly-side-up. This tends to disorient the fish and to quiet it.

If the hook has been swallowed or is otherwise difficult for you to remove just cut your tippet as close to the fly as you can and release the fish. This sounds cruel, but the hook will actually dissolve quite quickly in the fish. Its chances of survival are better this way than if you try to reach deep inside it to get at the hook.

You should release the fish in an area with a relatively slow current, where it can rest.
When the hook is removed, very gently hold the fish in the water with its back towards the sky and its head facing upstream until it makes a determined attempt to swim away. In some cases, you may need to move the fish headfirst back and forth in the water to get water flowing over its gills and revive it. Try to avoid this back and forth movement, if possible, as it may harm the fish by forcing too much water through its gills.

Be patient in reviving the fish. If it is big fish that gave you a hard fight it could take minutes to recover enough to swim away. It rewarded you with a memorable catch, so you owe it the time it takes to recover from this experience.

The beauty of the trout while in your hand will probably astound you. The feeling you get when it swims away is heart- warming ?much better than the feeling you would experience if you were to kill it, clean it and eat it. Try it. You?ll like it!

Part 6
Catch & no release
There may be times when you will decide to keep a fish for eating. The hook may have damaged it badly. It may be a small fish in a large population that would actually benefit by having the population thinned. Or you are just plain hungry for a trout.

If you do decide to keep the trout, treat it with respect. Rap it sharply on its head with the edge of your net or a rock to kill it quickly. Take it a long way from the water to clean it. (I’ll talk about whirling disease later.) Use a sharp knife to open its belly, and remove all of its innards. At the top of the body cavity you may see a line of dark material running underneath its spine. If so, scrape this away with your fingernail.

If you will be able to cook it or refrigerate it within 2-3 hours, you can put it in a plastic bag in the back pocket of your vest. If not, put it in a chilled creel or in a cooler with ice. If you allow the fish to spoil, you will have both wasted the meat and taken the life of a beautiful creature for nothing.

A creel is a wearable container made specifically for carrying the fish you have killed. The traditional ones are made from woven willow branches, like a basket. You line them with wet grasses to keep the fish cool via evaporation. The modern ones are made of canvas, which you wet to get the evaporation. If you decide to buy one, canvass creels are much more practical. The willow ones are purchased more as a home decoration than as a tool.

One warning about keeping a damaged trout – you can’t do it if you are fishing in waters that the state has designated only for catch & release fishing. It seems a shame to return a damaged trout to the water, knowing it will die, but it is the law in C&R-only waters and it actually has some benefits in the grand scheme of the water’s ecology. You won’t be eating that trout, but some critter will.

The foregoing chapter was written for freshwater fly fishing for trout, but it has also worked for me for smallmouths. If the techniques vary for other fish species, I hope an expert will join in to add advice.

Thanks!

Brad

I've only got a little to add to this thread. I was taught, by my Dad, how to fly fish and how hook sets were different than with other fishing methods. When hooking a fish on a fly rod, I rarely use the rod. Depending on the size of the fish, hook setting with the rod can leave you with the rod at 12:00 or more and then you have to try to recover that rod position without losing tension on the fish.
rather than using the rod, the hook set come from a hard pull of the line hand. You can move about 3 feet of line straight through the rod guides without moving the rod tip.
This accomplishes two things. One, if you get the hook set, you've got the full swing of the rod to keep tension on the fish ... fight on!!! If you missed the hook set, the fly is still within striking distance of the fish, or another and you've got another chance.
That's just how I was taught ... and Dad was teaching me how to fish for panfish and bass, not trout, so I don't know if the same principles will apply.