Boring information on fish hooks
A few years back I tried to figure out the whole hook thing. It seemed interesting at first. Then it was just tedium. Mainly, as has been pointed out, it’s just a matter of tradition and angler preference. I did learn a few things, some of which are interesting:
- Way back when, flies were tied on what amounted to sewing pins with the points bent in a J. Barbs were regarded as being for holding bait. There were no eyes, but rather a flattened or bulbus spot where a knot could be tied around the hook and the diameter difference would keep the line (horse tail hairs or, later, silkworm gut) attached.
- The notch or bulbus line-to-hook mechanism dates to the earliest days of hooks made out of bone and persisted as recently as the late 1800s or even early 1900s. In the days of silkworm gut leaders, guys would snell a short section of gut onto a hook before tying the fly, essentially incorporating the bulb and knot into the fly’s head. (Silkworm gut leaders are another marginally interesting part of the history of fly fishing. Monofilament of any kind is a vast improvement. Fishing with a bamboo rod is fun, but no one wants to go all the way back and start using silk lines and gut leaders.)
- Inventory control in a tackle shop is a pain in the @$$ in part because there are so many hook types and brands. If you are just selling fly hooks for trout, you’ve got about a dozen different brands, plus numerous variations (light wire, regular, heavy, forged, round and so on). If you don’t have every size from about #4 through #20 in every brand and every variety, some guy will walk in and be disappointed that you don’t have the Gamakatsu shrimp hook in size #18, as if the fish cared. More about the silliness of that in a second.
- For decades my dad was convinced that turned-up eyes were the only way to go when tying dry flies. Then in the mid to late 1980s, he went full on in the other direction. He came to believe turned up eyes resulted in more missed fish because somehow the fly was more easily pulled out of the trout’s mouth. He then fished exclusively with turned down eye dries. I will say, turned up eye dry fly hooks aren’t as easy to find these days as they were back in the 1970s. I’ll also say that he was a damn good angler, but his hooking-with-a-dry percentage didn’t change appreciably when he switched from turned up to turned down. It remained at about 50 percent, which is a hell of a lot better than my percentage.
- A number of hook types are named after places such as Aberdeen in Scotland and Limerick in Ireland. Supposedly this dates to early hook manufacturing operations being set up with different styles being made at different locations for no particular reason other than the guy making the hooks did it a certain way (tradition, as noted elsewhere in this thread).
- I am unable to tell the difference between an octopus hook and a circle hook. Don’t try to explain it to me because I just don’t care that much. Kind of like the infield fly rule.
- In addition to turned up, turned down and straight eyes, there’s also that situation where the eye is in the same plain with the bend of the hook. Typically this is seen in jig and shad dart hooks. In pouring lead jigs, there’s an advantage because you can lay the hooks flat in the jig mold, which you can’t do if the eye is perpendicular to the bend. Of the four eye configurations, it’s the only one that I can tell has a practical reason for being.
- For about 80 percent of my flies, Mustad 3906 or some other brand with a similar heavy wire works just fine. But like just about every fly angler, I turn into a freshly stocked trout when I’m in a fly shop and will buy the latest thing when I see it. A few months back, I was at Tochterman's and they had a little tungsten saddle and hook combination for making flies that sink super fast in high water. Turned out standard bead heads were easier to tie and achieved the same result. The hook-saddle weight rigs remain unused on my fly bench. As my dad used to say, that stuff catches more fishermen than fish.
- Fish do not care. They are not checking the style of your hook. Fish are not very smart. They will eat anything that floats down the stream that remotely looks like it might be good to eat. Applies especially to stocked trout, but also to wild ones. Remember, to a wild trout, a stick caddis looks almost exactly like a stick. People caught trout on flies back at least 1,800 years ago when Claudius Aelianus wrote about Roman soldiers using flies to catch (wild) trout in Greece. No doubt the hooks were less than dainty.
In addition to accumulating a ridiculous amount of fly fishing tackle and accessories over my decades of fly fishing, I also have accumulated a ridiculous amount of information about our beloved sport. The excess tackle, and excess information are, of course, useless on the stream – except on those rare occasions when they come in handy and result in a good catch.
