As a guide and someone who often takes friends fishing, I have taught many people how to fly fish. My process is straightforward. 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 them the basic knots needed to set up a rig and start fishing. I teach them how to make a perfection loop to tie on a leader, then we tie on 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. After the gear is rigged, we go to the water and practice the art of fly casting for a bit until I feel they are ready to actually fish. 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, great emphasis is put on tying strong knots. However, I feel 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 suddenly, with one wrong move, your rig is completely tangled, and it’s game over until you can get it straightened out.
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 some tricks and techniques to help you untangle more quickly and get back on the water as efficiently as possible.
THE FIRST STEP: STOP CASTING
The first and most important thing to do is to 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 line and said, “Hey, stop casting for a second. Let me have a look at your line.” The client makes one more cast because they didn’t notice the tangle, and my words didn’t register in time. Whamo—the next thing I know, their 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 affect the strength of my rig, I’d rather take the time to untie a tangle and not waste more line by re-rigging.
CASTING KNOTS
The first type of tangle we’ll cover is the common wind knot. I grew up hearing people call them wind knots, but they’re actually casting knots. Let’s not sugarcoat it. This 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 even a bit loose, you can firmly grab the line about an inch away from the tangle on both sides and apply direct pressure towards the tangle. You should see it start to pull apart. Then simply feed the fly back through the loop, and voilà, problem solved.
If the tangle is pulled really tight, though, the only way I have found to get it out is by poking into the middle of the tangle with the point of a hook or a hook-eye cleaner on a snippet tool. Take one of your flies and use the very point of the hook to poke into the tangle and try to pry the lines apart enough to perform the first steps I mentioned. If you succeed in untangling the knot, you must carefully assess your leader to see if it has been structurally affected. Run your fingers down it to feel for any 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 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. Many beginner fly anglers lose fish this way all the time. It’s worth noting that regular monofilament line has more elasticity and can retain up to 80% of its strength even with an overhand loop. Fluorocarbon, on the other hand, will snap much more easily with a knot in it.
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 rod tip toward the water and start shaking it. Once in a while, this 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 shaking it frantically, 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 with my right hand and grab the rod just above 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 tangle is caused by 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 unwrapping a couple of loops, and a rod guide has grabbed the line. Then you need to go the other direction. Sometimes, if a big loop is 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 or 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 recognizing you have a problem before continuing to cast and make it worse. If you do make it worse, you might need to use the steps from the previous paragraph, then do the loop-over trick. Just be careful not to break the tip of the rod anytime you are messing around up there.
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, multiple hinge points are created in your leader during 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.
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 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 is 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 has doubled back in such a way that the weight forms its own loop and starts wrapping around the rest of the line elements. This is most easily identifiable 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 back it out through the tangle first. Take a close look and try to push the weight and the loop of the leader that it’s 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, it helps to take the indicator off, if possible, and then put it back on when the tangle is freed.
Another helpful tip is to cut the tippet for the dropper fly off where it joins the primary leader, if it is accessible, and untangle the dropper line from the tangle first. 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, ultimately saving time.
AFTER THE TANGLE
No matter what kind of tangle it is, after you get it undone, 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 and 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 ten 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 ten 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.
REEL KNOTS
One last tangle to cover is the one you get inside your reel or in your running line. Those types of tangles are almost always caused by a loop of line going through another loop of line and pulled tight. In this case, find the master loop or problem loop, and you can often get them undone quickly.
If your reel seizes up, it is often because you get a loose loop in the line, and when you start to reel, a tight loop ends up on the wrong side of it. In this case, pull as much line off the reel as you can until it locks up. Then look for the loose loop. Grab the top of it and pull it up and out of the reel until it unwinds enough to work the other line past it. This can be frustrating, but it often doesn’t take too much time once you figure out what is going on. Another thing that can lock the reel is if a loose loop gets flipped over the reel handle. That one is even easier to spot. Similar things happen when your running line tangles. It’s almost always because one loop gets onto the wrong side of another, and then things get pulled tight. If you can find the problem loop, or the “master loop,” push it back through the other one and pull it all out slowly. These are easy to spot in thick running line but harder to discern in backing or on a mono rig.
IN CONCLUSION
Keep in mind that the more things you have on your line, the more opportunity you have for tangles. If you are fishing a dry fly on a tapered leader with no tippet, that’s going to be the easiest to keep clean. As soon as you add a section of tippet, you have one surgeon’s or blood knot for the line to pass over if it doubles over itself. Add a second fly, and the hinge points start to grow. Add two flies, a split shot or two, an indicator, and a few sections of tippet, and you are basically playing Jenga on every cast.
So 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.
