Some years ago, while a was visiting friends out of state, I came down with a severe case of stomach pain. I went to a clinic and the following morning, out came my appendix.
Appendicitis isn’t to be taken lightly. That small, narrow pouch, about the size of your pinkie finger, attached to your large intestine, can grow inflamed, and if it bursts, can spread infection through your abdominal cavity. And that can kill you.
I remember learning in grade school that the appendix was vestigial, a remnant piece of a more robust digestive system our species needed when our diet consisted of coarser food more likely to make us sick than the modern human diet. We didn’t really need our appendix any longer, grade-school me learned, so it was always promptly removed when appendicitis flared up.
Now I’ve learned that a lot of companies and anglers think a standard feature on most fly rods should also go the way of the appendix. Hook keepers, apparently, have become vestigial.
When I first started fly fishing, back in another century, 8 ½ foot fly rods were the norm, and I usually fished with a 7 ½ foot leader. Hook keepers worked well with such a setup. If you needed a break, you slipped your fly hook onto the hook keeper (a wire loop near the cork grip) reeled in the slack line until it was snug, and a foot or so of fly line still extended beyond the tip, making it easy-peasy to strip off line when you got back to fishing.
Besides convenience, this was important because most of us learned early in our fly-fishing careers that reeling the fly line/leader connection into the line guides was a rule you never broke. I remember a fishing shop owner giving me exactly that advice.
“If you’re using an 8 ½ foot rod, your leader can’t be longer than that,” the shop owner told me. “Otherwise, how do you expect to get your fish close enough to net?”
This memory makes me chuckle.
I soon learned to net a fish while using a leader longer than my fly rod, while also keeping the dreaded line/leader connection out of my guides. I also learned that if I tied a proper nail knot, I could get away with pulling that knot into the guides. I suppose it’s possible your fish could make a late run, and the knot could hang up on the guides, allowing the fish to break you off, but I’ve never had that happen.
The same goes for the loop-to-loop connections common these days.
Even if I don’t worry about my loop-to-loop hanging up on my guides, I still don’t care to reel the fly line into the guides, because you probably know when that connection does get hung up in the guides —whenever you’re trying to strip off line and get back to fishing.
I have nightmares of that slack line forming a growing loop between my rod tip and the second line guide, thwarting my efforts to false cast and lengthen my line.
So, like most folks, I stop short of reeling the connection back into my guides. And since I’m often fishing leaders 12 or more feet long, I wrap the leader around my reel and then run my fly back up the rod, ignoring the hook keeper and securing the hook around the base of the stripper guide.
In this era of long leaders, that hook keeper is no more useful than my appendix, though they say this withered organ still plays a role in maintaining proper gut health. They also try to get me to drink kombucha, so I’m not sure they can be trusted.
I won’t miss hook keepers if manufacturers phase them out. There are better places to secure your fly. Like our bodies, fly fishing gear must evolve.