Last year I decided to get into fly fishing, and have been practicing so I’d be ready to catch a red on the flats behind my house this year. I have had two hookups, only to be devastated when the fish spat the fly. One I only had on for about 20-30 seconds, and I knew I probably hadn’t set it right, but this last one I had on for a good minute or more. I really thought I had set the hook well, but obviously not since I lost him, even though I never gave him any slack. Is there some trick that I don’t know???
“Curiousity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect." Steven Wright
A while back, I was fishing with the boy who taught me how to fly fish. Reds were on a flat and happily tailing. He set a big ole deer hair fly in front of a fish that looked like he was thirty inches and the fish snapped it like mouse trap. Got a few seconds of run out of it and it spit the hook. This happened again on a smaller fish. He was obviously throwing the right fly but, the gods weren’t with him. Actually, what he didn’t notice was that the hook had broken. He was throwing a hook with no point. Now, my POINT. Make sure you have a hook with a point and that that point is sharp enough to stick into the back of your thumb nail. A fly should be sharp, sharp, sharp. Reds have hard lips. Also, if you let the line kind of slip through your hand immediately after the fish bites so that you feel it tug through your fingers with continuous tension, that would help. You should never let ANY slack go in the line. You don’t have to horse it but, never let the line go slack. Does this help anything?
Are you setting the hook with the rod or with a strip strike? When you retrieve a fly, you should have your rod tip in the water and your rod pointed at the fly. When you get a strike, you set the hook with a yank of your line hand, not with a sweep of the rod. You will get more solid hook sets and you will not rip the fly away from fish in case he misses on the first try.
Dragonslayer, I think you got lucky with the article that chattahoochee posted a link to. I hesitated to say “strip-strike” because it might imply jerking the fly from the fishes mouth. But this article looks like it really nails the hook setting process for fish like reds and bones. Thanks, Chatt. Good luck Dragon.