Brandon Hayward blog, 365 days, 365 blogs

Friday, April 06, 2012

You can’t worry about pulling hooks

This is one of my few steadfast beliefs when it comes to any kind of fishing, but Spectra fishing in general: you can’t worry about pulling hooks.

Ask anglers who have fished short topshot a bunch how they feel about pulling hooks, and they’ll say that it’s overrated, that you just have to hope that the hook gets some flesh and bone and you can pull hard.

Look at where the hooks are on the fish you land. Most of the time you couldn’t have pulled that hook no matter how hard you tried. Sure, the “shallow” hook placements, the ones where the hook just caught a membrane or flap of skin, are going to result in pulled hooks. And maybe sometimes those shallow hook sets would have resulted in the fish hitting the deck if mono was being used, after all the rubber band effect of mono to go with lighter drag settings that come with lighter tackle isn’t as violent.

But think about it like this: you are going to get more bites with a stealth rig for offshore species and you are going to land more fish in heavy kelp and structure with the Spectra kelp cutter rig. So the occasional pulled hook is negated by getting bit better/being able to pull the fish out of the kelp.

Nobody who has ever hooked a 50-plus-pound seabass on the edge of a kelp line with Spectra has ever uttered, “Oh, I wish I had mono right now.”

But there’s been many a pissed-off angler who has asked themselves why they didn’t fish the Spectra in a location that was screaming for it.

Posted By Sally On 04/06/2012 At 10:49 AM Comments (0) Trackbacks (0)

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