On Fishing. Brian Clarke
and often unthinking animal the average angler is. It was almost impossible to find a suitable hook for fly-tying that had no barb. The reason so few shops stock barbless hooks is because so few anglers demand them. And it makes no sense.
It is now decades since I last fished with a fly tied on a barbed hook. Indeed, even when coarse fishing, I almost always fish barbless because the advantages are so obvious and significant.
A barb on a hook serves only two purposes. The first, in coarse fishing, is that it helps to keep a bait on board. The second, in any fishing, is that it gives some anglers peace of mind. The idea that a bait is less likely to have wriggled or fallen off the hook is, of course, comforting to a coarse or sea angler – though the notion is irrelevant to a fly fisherman, who is not using bait. The thought that a hook with a barb on should in theory not be able to come out, can comfort some in the middle of a fight.
It is worth setting against these ideas, some facts. Chief among them – as anyone who habitually fishes barbless knows – is that no more fish are lost from barbless hooks than from barbed. Many will say that fewer fish come adrift.
Anyone in doubt should consider what happens – and can test the principles involved with a short length of line, a hook and a piece of wood into which the hook point has been clicked.
A fish rises to a fly or takes a bait and the angler responds by striking. In an instant the line tightens, exerts its pull on the hook eye and the hook point begins to go home. Alas, it does not always arrive. A barb sticking out from a hook just behind the point creates a wider part of the wire that slows penetration. Sometimes it stops penetration completely and the hook gains the merest purchase.
All sorts of things can then ensue. One is that the fish, held only by the tip of the hook point, comes off instantly – it has ‘been pricked’. Another common occurrence – especially for dry fly anglers, who need to use fine-wire hooks in the interests of lightness – is that as the point slows penetration and the pull of the line on the eye increases, leverage causes the hook bend to open, again enabling the fish to slip free.
There is a third possibility. A barb is not added to a hook, but is cut into it and the spot at which the cut is made naturally represents a weak-point. Too often the result – especially with cheap, fine-wire hooks – is that the great leverage exerted on the point by the pull on the hook’s eye, causes the point to snap clean off. Another lost fish.
With a barbless hook, none of this happens. Without a barb, a hook has no weak point and no wider point to slow penetration. If a barbless hook gains a purchase, the odds are that it will go home, first time.
Once home, it is much less likely to come out than might be imagined. Any angler playing a fish needs to keep a tight line to stay in control – which helps to keep the hook in place. But even if the line is allowed to fall slack it is extremely unusual for a hook to come free. The mere action of a fish swimming means that it tows the line, which exerts enough drag on the hook to keep it secure. In a river, even if a fish stops swimming and the line is allowed to fall slack, the hook stays in place. The reason is that in a river the fish is obliged to face upstream, into the current and the current carries the line downstream behind the fish – again exerting drag on the hook.
There is another, overriding consideration why I not only always fish barbless with a fly but almost always fish barbless when using bait. It is because even the tiniest barb can make a hook difficult to remove and the fish often has to be taken from the water to get the hook out. Any time a fish spends out of the water adds stress for it and, in inexpert hands, there is an added risk in the process of the fish being damaged.
In contrast, a fish taken on a barbless hook can be set free with ease, the hook simply sliding out. Indeed, there is rarely a need for a fish taken on a barbless hook to leave the water at all – a reason why, when trout fishing on most rivers, I not only do not use barbed hooks but do not carry a landing net, either.
It is in spite of all of this that anglers keep on demanding hooks with barbs and why the trade, not unnaturally, keeps on supplying them to the exclusion of pretty well all else.
There are fixes: a barb on a hook can be pressed flat in the vice before fly-tying begins or – caught at the waterside with a shop-bought article – the barb can be pressed down with a pair of small, flat-nosed pliers, a tool that has many other uses besides.
Both actions are the work of a moment, but still that weak spot remains and the odd point snaps off. If only more anglers would recognise the benefits of barbless hooks and would ask for them, the problem – and not the fish – would go away.
ASK A NON-ANGILER to name the best-selling angling book of all time and the most likely answer will be Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. Ask a fisherman – one over 40, anyway – and the one-word response will be ‘Crabtree’.
It is hard to find a middle-aged angler who does not have Bernard Venables’ marvellous book. In the 20 years to 1970 Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing was almost a compulsory buy. My own copy – yellowing, frayed and dated ‘Christmas, 1952’ in a childish hand – is beside me as I write.
No-one knows how many copies Izaak Walton’s pastoral hymn has sold, though in the 350 years since it appeared it has run to more than 400 editions, printed in dozens of languages. Anglers know that Venables’ paperback story of father showing son how to fish through the angling year – largely through wonderfully executed, cartoon-style strips with informative bubbles – sold hugely. Few know what the true figure was. All knew its impact on them. Its importance, the way it enthralled two generations of young angling minds, was so great that, in later life, Venables became positively revered, the first Izaak Walton since Izaak Walton.
I got to know Bernard quite well. I first met him in the early 1990s when I interviewed him for one of my columns for The Times. Subsequently we found ourselves, quite independently, guests at a fishing dinner in Wales and we jiggled the place-names about so that we could sit together and talk. The next meeting was at a small lunch party, held in a mutual friend’s home, to mark Bernard’s 90th birthday. I met him several times more before he died on April 21, 2001 – and subsequently was invited by Eileen, his wife, to speak at the memorial gathering held to celebrate his life. It was one of the greatest gatherings of anglers – eminent anglers – that can have ever been brought together in one place. I did not write about that, but I did write about his extraordinary burial.
ON MAY DAY, under a cherry tree just breaking into blossom and not a fly-cast from one of the rivers he lived much of his life for, the most-widely known and best-loved angler since Izaak Walton, was laid to rest.
Bernard Venables, creator of Mr Crabtree and author of the extraordinary Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, a work that sold over two million copies and that lit the torch in two generations of young angling minds, was not a religious man and there was not a trace of formal religion in the two events of the day.
The first was a simple, private gathering of family and friends – if it had been public, there would have been thousands there – in a village hall deep in Hampshire. Friends recalled their memories of the man they knew and one read a marvellously crafted, humorous piece that Venables wrote in 1953 about the dangers of leaving groundbait in the vicinity of horses. Later there was the simple interment ceremony conducted on the side of the sloping downland hill in the wind and the rain.
For all that there was no religion in the day, it was a spiritual occasion. Venables had lived his 94-plus years in tune with nature, close to the earth, marvelling at its wonders, secure in his mortality. When he died on April 21, after a mercifully short illness, he was ready and content.
Venables was devoid of pretension. He genuinely wanted to be buried in a cardboard box – he saw his own return to the earth as the landing of just another dust-speck on the turning wheel of time and felt that to use anything else would be pointless. But it was not to be. When he was lowered into the pure, white chalk it was in a more startlingly appropriate way: in a wicker basket made