Listen to the radio on any station be it rap, country, rock, jazz, or heavy metal and you will hear a hook. The hooks in any popular song are the parts that appeal to you and keep you listening to the rest of the song. You remember the hooks later. You sing them over other songs. You air guitar a particularly sweet bit of solo at work. In fishing lures as in music there are sometimes more than one hook, but usually one does the work while the other is riding wingman. Hooks are designed to ensnare and hold something, like a listener or a fish. I have great affection for hooks. The evolution of fishing hooks from elongated vees made of bone or wood to modern curved creations ending in razor points and sexy barbs is too much history of trial and error for me to ignore.
I am primarily a fly fisherman, but you won’t catch me riding barbless. A small, shallow barb on a size 16 dry fly is a perfect hook for a brook trout. They are smallish themselves, and you want to release them easily and relatively unharmed. A more substantial barb with a chemically sharpened point on a stainless steel something-ought would be more appropriate for striped bass. Redfish have rubbery mouths that hold a hook well generally, so they may be a good argument for going barbless; but where there are redfish, there are sometimes speckled trout. Specks have weaker mouths that require more hooking power so a barb is definitely in the picture. Bycatch is always a good argument for anything fishing related. Who can argue with more and different fish?
Different brands of hooks evoke different emotional responses from me. Eagle Claw hooks remind me of a childhood fascination with snelled hooks. A well done snell by itself is a beautiful thing, but the placement of a dozen or so snelled hooks in a long rectangular package with bold and patriotic packaging is a small piece of art. The bronzed hooks themselves are the color of practicality and seem to possess workmanlike properties. Eagle Claw gets the job done, and done well. Gamakatsu hooks are pure science fiction with mirror finishes and every pore closed. They have hubris. They mean business, but not in a clinical way. These are tiny machines sent out to catch fish. Owner hooks feel brutal. They are weapons of war. The Owner cutting point style hook is a curved spear with built in blood gutters. Owner hooks reek of research and design, graph paper drawings and American ingenuity. Mustad hooks are pure Nordic tradition, even though they have a U.S. plant nowadays. The vast majority of Mustad’s catalogue is for lure and bait fishing, but they will always be a fly fishing hook company to me, which gives them a traditional feel. I could go on and on about specific companies, but you get the idea.
I had been looking for a specific hook for a while. Not like a ferocious hunt where I pore over catalogues intensely and check minimum orders and pricing, more like a laid back longing. Jig hooks are predominately sold in ninety degree bend, but my purposes required more like sixty degrees. I needed something in the order of a 3/0 freshwater hook. Most of what I could find was too thin a gauge wire or stainless steel with a big barb. I needed the hook for a jigging bass fly, and it can be difficult to penetrate a bass’ mouth with a huge saltwater barb using a long fly rod. Weeks into this casual affair, and in the course of my normal Green Top duties in the warehouse, I was moving around some Eagle Claw products, and found an old box of just such a hook. The number was still in the system, so I bought those precious things on my lunch break. They were a beautiful bronzed hook with a lower profile barb, and a thicker gauge wire in size 3/0. It has been nearly two weeks since I made the purchase, and I have tied a couple dozen flies with the hooks, but not a day has passed where I haven’t pulled out one of those beauties to admire it and force someone within my reach to also take in some minute detail of form I find to point out. My wife hates it, but she is a good sport. My friends think it is strange, even the ones who fish. Maybe you as a reader think what I’m saying is out of left field. I’m just putting down to paper one small confession of a hook addict.
-Gabe Beverly