I went through a patch of breaking off in way too many fish. It wasn’t pretty. Apart from the cursing, I was usually in disbelief when a tippet parted. I would be fishing some quite strong string, and it would just fail on me with the tiniest pull, often after having landed an earlier fish, or perhaps landed a bush, which had fought much harder than the one that gave rise to its failure. “Lost its structural integrity” as PD would say. He also says that when someone drops a tray of glassware.
So I obsessed over knots for a while. Perhaps rightly so. I tried tying all my major joins at home, where no rising fish was giving me the shakes. I also seated them with some UV knotsense instead of saliva, and then dried them (very briefly) in the sun. That has been a game-changer, I must say. To a large degree I seem to have averted these breaks way up the leader or at the tippet ring. But of course , in the “rough and tumble of flyfishing” as Tom Sutcliffe once called it, you have to re-tie tippets while rising fish are goading you.
The simple thing I am doing more of in that department, is giving my knots a test. In other words I give them a proper tug. Quite a violent one sometimes. I do this a couple of times during the day too: typically when I have been on the water a while, nothing has been happening, and that unexpected smash take is…….well it becomes expected. You probably know that premonition that one gets. You suddenly come to realize that your mind is wandering, its perhaps a bit hot and humid, and crickets are sounding in the long grass like they do just before something explodes, and you get the heeby-jeebies. Well I do anyway, and that’s when I test my tippet. I am often surprised at how it gives way so easily that it is a miracle it even held the fly on in the cast I just made. Mostly it is the knots, that have worked loose, or cut into themselves, but sometimes a weak point has developed in some random length of a piece of 6X.
Speaking of 6X: We have all heard those stories about how blokes test a piece of 6X with a 5 weight fly rod and a fence post, and they tell you they can’t break the stuff. And yet we get broken off by fish a lot less sturdy than that fence post. It is an untested leader, I tell you. And I have a painful memory of how strong 6X can be when it doesn’t have a weak spot.
I was fishing the Mooi at lower Riverside, and the river was flowing strongly. At some point, my tail fly got caught on a sub surface stick in the deep strong flow in front of me. Not wanting to break off a little flashback Pheasant Tail which was looking particularly good, I waded in as far as it was safe to go, and reached for the fly.
Something jerked. I can’t remember what, and I ended up with the dropper fly firmly embedded in my finger. At this very moment, the stick that the tail fly was embedded in morphed into a branch which had a lot of resistance, and it lifted off the river bed and started to be carried downstream.
The current was strong, and there was no prospect of loosening the tension to reverse the barbless hook from my finger. I was in pain. I lurched forward a step, and started to lose my footing in the current as quickly as the river took up the slack I thought I had created. I can hear you saying “why didn’t you just reach for your nippers”. I don’t know. I suppose it all just happened so quickly. Also, my arm was extended out over the river, far from the reach of my zinger. In the split seconds in which this unfolded, what I ended up doing was pulling until the 6X broke.
It was a straining break.
Let me tell you, that the whole thing was a traumatic experience, and I now know that I should NEVER break off on a fish in a fair fight (I mean excluding logs, reeds and rootballs). To me, it is also proof that fish don’t feel pain like we do, because given any chance at all I would have followed that pull straight into the waiting landing net.
Anyway. Long story. The point is to check your tippet with a good strong tug every now and then, or when you get the heebie jeebies. Just do be careful not to embed the fly into yourself while doing this. Oh: and try doing all your long-term knots at home with UV glue.
