In this week’s RIO Fly Fishing Tip Wayne Peterson shows a really neat way to unhook a fish with your rod tip, and avoid harming it by touching it. This tip is best achieved with a barbless hook, by pulling the fly into the tip ring of the rod, and then giving a gentle push with the rod tip to unhook the fly from the fish’s mouth.
When trying this tip for the first time, be slow and careful, and keep your rod tip straight, and your line tight to avoid any chance of breaking your rod.
A slightly dazed and confused British reader thinks to himself: Some major rod brands with a “lifetime” replacement guarantee are really going to love THAT one … devilish, freely given, not fully thought through (that’s our version of your ”thru’) tip, thy name is “I had a rod but you made it snappy” legion….
And another thing …. a later thought, rather….
About Attitude and Angling ethics.
Are beaten fish such a pesky nuisance and consumer of your valuable waterside time that you want them off your hook as quickly as possible, so you can stick it another (then another, and yet another and so really rack up a score…) and so become a toute de suite Total Fishing Machine! (Early hominid “Grunt”) suite? So maximizing your “hit rate” and catch-and-released (so it’s okay…) fishing pal-impressing, fragile ego-boosting “bodycount”?
You do?
Well, call me terribly quaint and old-fashioned, even pathetically British, but I reckon if a fish graces your day by complying with your meanest Me, Piscator The Barbarian expectations and requirements, you owe it a debt of care and a little of your time and, even, some of that now much-abused word Respect, otherwise it’s just ripping so many lips and click-counting your pathetic conquests, which you could probably get back at home – certainly at work……..
Boote leaving now and going back, for his considerable sins, to “Fear Street Part 2 – 1978”, a light-hearted, old-style teen-slasher movie about a massacre of kids, as opposed to trout, at a Summer Camp.