As a guide, I have taught many people how to fly fish. First I go over the equipment. Then we talk about casting. After that, I present the different types of flies. Then, before we fish, I teach the basic knots one needs to get a rig set up and start fishing. I show how to make a Perfection Loop to tie on a leader, then we tie on a tippet with a Double Surgeon’s Knot, and finally we tie on flies with a basic Clinch Knot. I do this because it was the order of things that I learned when I started fly fishing. Then we go to the water and practice the art of fly casting until I feel the students are ready actually to fish. At that point, inevitably, as soon as I walk away from one person to help another, I hear the dreaded, “Hey, when you get a minute, I think I have a knot in my line.”
In fly fishing, the greatest emphasis is put on tying strong knots. However, I feel that as much or more emphasis should be placed on untying knots. Or to be more precise, what many refer to as a “knot” is actually a tangle. Knots are tied intentionally. Tangles aren’t. In my experience, for both beginners and experienced anglers, tangles are the number-one cause of the “fly-fishing sucks” attitude. You’re happily casting away, and all of a sudden, with one wrong move, your rig is completely tangled, and it’s game over until you can get it straightened out again.
Over the years, I have spent hundreds of hours untangling lines and leaders for clients and, yes, even for myself. Even though seasoned anglers learn the tricks of casting and how to avoid tangles, they still happen, even to the best of us. All it takes is one wrong stroke or a moment of averted attention. After many hours of practice, I now consider myself a bit of an expert tangle remover. In this article, I hope to share with you some tricks and techniques to help get you untangled more quickly and back on the water.
The First Step: Stop Casting
The first and most important thing to do is stop casting as soon as you recognize there is a problem. I don’t know how many times I have noticed a small tangle starting in a client’s rig and said, “Hey, stop casting for a second. Let me have a look at your line.” The client makes one more cast because he or she didn’t spot the problem and my words didn’t register in time. Whamo — the next thing I know, my client’s nymph rig looks like a spider web with a split shot in the middle and two flies tangled in it. So as soon as you notice a problem of any kind with your line or leader, immediately stop casting. The sooner you recognize the problem, the easier it is to fix.
I’ve found that most tangles can be fixed easily if one has the patience to examine them closely, find the origin of the tangle, and take a few minutes to remove it. My motto is that if it is possible to untie a tangle in a reasonable amount of time, and if the leader is not pinched to the point where it will effect the strength of my rig, I’d rather take the time to untie a tangle and not waste more line by rerigging.
Casting Knots
The first type of tangle I will discuss is the common wind knot. At least I grew up hearing people call them “wind knots,” but they are actually casting knots. This type of tangle forms when one is fishing a dry fly with an overhead cast and a tailing loop occurs. On the forward cast, the fly drops below the plane of the line and leader, and the fly goes through the resulting hole and forms a small Overhand
Knot in the tippet or leader, depending on where it pulls tight.
If you recognize this type of tangle in time, it can be very easy to fix. If the overhand loop is still a bit loose, you just firmly grab the leader about an inch away from the tangle on both sides. Then apply direct pressure toward the knot. You should see it start to push apart. Then simply feed the fly back trough the loop, and voilà, the problem is solved.
If the knot is pulled really tight, though, the only way I have found to get it out is by poking into the middle of the knot with the point of a hook or a hookeye cleaner on a tippet-snipper tool. Take one of your flies and use just the point of the hook to poke into the knot and try to pry it apart enough to perform the first steps I mentioned. If you succeed in un-tangling the knot, you must carefully assess your leader to see if it has been structurally affected. Run you fingers down it to feel if there is a noticeable abrasion or weak spot. If you find one of these, or if you can’t get the knot out, cut the leader and retie that section with a Double Surgeon’s Knot or Blood Knot. If left untreated, this type of tangle can result in your fly breaking off, either while casting or after you’ve hooked a fish.
Wrapping the Rod
While overhead casting with a single dry fly, the only other thing that can really go wrong besides a casting knot is the fly line wrapping around the rod. When this happens, the most common instinct is to point the tip of the rod toward the water and start shaking it. Once in a while, this actually works. More often than not, it just makes things worse. My advice is to stop immediately as soon as you see or feel that your line is wrapped around the rod. Before you point your rod down and start frantically shaking it, take a close look to see what happened. Most fly rods are strong enough that you can hold them all the way up to the midpoint and bend them without breaking. If I’m in the water or on a surface such as sand where I don’t want to set my reel down, I reach up my rod with my right hand and grab it just at the middle ferrule. This allows me to bring the tip of the rod closer to my eyes, where I can examine the problem.
Sometimes the fly has come back and caught a guide on the rod. That’s pretty easy to fix. If you can see the fly just resting in a guide and no other line is tangled, just tap the rod gently with your free hand until the fly falls out or simply reach up and free it.
If the line is wrapped around the rod several times, this can be a bit trickier. One would think that line could wrap around the rod in only one direction, so once you assess which direction the first few wraps go, you can just wave your rod around in a circular motion in the opposite direction and the whole deal will swivel loose. Due to all the guides on the rod, though, this is often not the case. If the line is wrapped in multiple directions or the source of the tangle is the line hitting the rod down low, with the ensuing loop tangled around the rod in both directions, this technique will not work. I do recommend swooping the rod around in a circular motion, but reassess after each loop unwraps. Often you will need to change directions after a couple of loops unwrap and a rod guide has grabbed the line. Then you need to go the other direction. Sometimes if a big loop wrapped, you might have to go in each direction a couple of times to get all the loops free.
The other common rod tangle is when a loop forms between two-rod guides and gets big enough to go over the tip of the rod. This will immediately prevent your line from coming in or going out. Sometimes it’s a mystery just how this happens. Most often, it happens at the top, between the first and second guides or between the second and third guides. If this occurs, find which guide the loop came from and pull enough line from the reel to let you place the loop back over the tip of the rod. This should solve the problem. The key is being able to recognize that you have a problem before you keep casting and make it worse. If you do make it worse, then you might need to utilize the steps from the previous paragraph and then do the loop-over trick.
Tangles When Nymphing
By far the worst and most tricky tangles occur while nymph fishing. With split shot, one or two flies, and an indicator, there will be multiple hinge points in your leader when casting, and that can be a recipe for disaster. These extra items also create more places where loops can form and spin around in a tangle, creating a complex “bird’s nest” that is difficult to unravel. Unfortunately, we do a lot of nymph fishing in my area. I have taught hundreds of people how to construct and fish nymph rigs, and consequently, I have had to deal with thousands of tangles. The key to undoing these tangles is to find the source point of the tangle.
I think intuitively most people start with the flies. And indeed, sometimes the flies are the source of the tangle, especially if you are using two. If the weight and indicator are not tangled, then yes, it is only your flies that are the problem. When this is the case, start with the dropper fly and work backward. Free as much line above it as possible. Do this by just pulling it out softly or gently pushing the other loops of line up the tippet away from the dropper. Then start working the dropper fly gently through each loop until your tangle comes undone. If the tangle is too tight to open each loop and work the fly back through it, take the hook point of a fly and use it to lever apart the tight tangles until the mess is loose enough to make sense of.
If your weight or indicator are involved in the tangle, this can lead to a different set of assessments and solutions. Most of these kinds of tangles can be broken down into two categories: weight knots and indicator knots.
A weight knot forms when the leader or tippet have doubled back in such a way that the weight formed its own loop and started wrapping around the rest of the line elements. This is most clearly recognizable if the weight is hanging out of the middle of the tangle somewhere on a small loop. If you see this, start with the weight and begin by backing it out through the tangle first. Take a close look and try to push the weight and the loop of leader that it is on through the correct holes in the tangle. If you go through the wrong hole, you will start to make things worse. If you feed the weight loop correctly through the holes it formed, this will free things up enough that you can then untangle the rest easily.
The same situation can occur with the indicator. Look to see if the indicator is hanging through a hole on a loop. If so, start there and back it through until it is freed up, and then go from there.
If the tangle is really bad, all three of these elements might be tangled. If so, start with the indicator, if you can. Then do the weight, then the flies. Sometimes if possible it helps to take the indicator off and then put it back on when the tangle is freed.
Another helpful tip is that, if it is accessible, cut the tippet for the dropper fly off where it joins the primary leader and untangle the dropper line from the tangle first. And if the dropper and main fly come undone easily and most of the major tangle is above them, cut both flies off. It will make it easier to undo the upper tangle in the weight and indicator and ultimately save time.
Both indicator knots and weight knots can also occur when the line springs back and hits your rod. In this case, most often, it is either the weight or the indicator that forms a loop and wraps around the rod, drawing the rest of the leader and line in and creating a tangle around the rod. Take a close look to see which one is hanging on its own loop and start there. Sometimes doing so can save a lot of time, as opposed to just starting at the flies and working backward.
After the Tangle
No matter what kind of tangle it is, after you have it undone it, make sure to recheck your leader and tippet for abrasions and/or weak spots caused by pinches. If you find one, cut it out and retie. It’s better to take the extra time than to lose a fish and leave a bunch of junk in its mouth. Not all tangles are huge and catastrophic. Some are very small and barely noticeable. These can be just as detrimental to a good day’s fishing, though. Sometimes your dropper can double over and catch your first fly. If you’re busy casting away, this can be hard to spot. It seems like a small thing, but a simple fold or loop could mean the difference between your flies looking like food to a fish or not. Take the time to check your rig every few minutes. If the upper parts of the line and the leader look good, there might still be a problem with your bugs. They are the most important part of your rig, after all. Just pull your flies up through the water far enough to see them and check that they look all right before casting again. Then be sure to recheck your line with your fingers when you move to a different fishing spot to make sure a casting knot hasn’t formed. That could make the difference between landing a big fish or talking about the one that got away.
If all else fails, and a tangle is just unmanageable, implement the 10-Minute Rule. The 10-Minute Rule is that if it’s going to take you longer than 10 minutes to untangle a tangle, you’re better off just cutting it all off and retying the rig. Some of my more impatient friends advocate using a 5-Minute Rule. I will usually give a good tangle 10 minutes of my time, because I hate to waste line due to the environmental impacts of monofilament line production and disposal. I also rarely, if ever, fish fluorocarbon for this reason.
Also, keep track of all your tag ends of tippet and leader and don’t discard spent, kinked, or otherwise ruined material on the riverbanks, in the water, or in the bushes. It’s a good idea to have a separate pocket or a film container with an X cut in the top to push your discarded pieces into for later disposal.
The next time you get a knot in your line, take a minute to figure out what kind of tangle it is, then take these steps to undo it and get yourself back into position to catch a fish without throwing a fit — or your rod.
