"Circle Hooks"

I want to go back to the late 60s and early 70s when I was doing a lot of carp fishing. At that time in the UK, most carp anglers were following the Walker methodology, ie freelining and even trying to hit twitchers.

In SA we were chucking out 3 and 4 ounce leads to the horizon or rowing out rigs with boats. There were even a few anglers with radio controlled bait boats then.

Rigs were not designed to be sensitive. The were designed such that the fish hooked themselves.

What contributed to the success of these rigs was a deeply incurved hook - a "bent hook" in fact. I don't use hooks like this these days because from past experience they damage fish.

I have just had the latest Leslies of Luton catalogue through the post. In it it lists the Owner Mutu light Circle Hook.

Now this is virtually identical to the style of hook we were using nearly 40 years ago in South Africa.

What do you think? Are they harmful to fish?

Big Rik? Cakey? Monk?

Quite the opposite of harmful. Positively good.

I did a bit of research on these hooks when I first heard about them in American fly fishing circles a couple of years ago.

The history and development of circle hooks was originally a conservation experiment with a view to reducing sea turtle deaths on long line self-hooking rigs set for tuna. Which they did, very significantly indeed, to the extent that it is now unlawful in most waters in the Pacific to use anything else.

What surprised these sea fishermen (and we are talking about unromantic types who fish for a living with no interest in bullshit) was an entirely unexpected secondary side effect: the catches of tuna went up by 80% compared to conventional bend hooks !

AIUI the objectionable bent hook rigs that you refer to and which did such damage in the past were hooks where the shank was bent to curve over a straight / conventionally curved hook bend with straight point, aligning the point with the hook eye. Circle hooks are quite different, the exact opposite in fact. They have the point itself curved and bent in towards a conventional straight shank, ending up at 90 degrees to the eye. Pics on the links below explain it a lot better than I can in words.

My interest was engaged because it seemed to me that they might well be a safer and significantly more succesful hook to use with self-hooking / bolt rigs. Nothing came of my thoughts about it at the time because the only sizes of circle hooks then available in the UK were sea fishing sizes 1/0 and larger and I was too lazy to follow up on American / Jap contacts for personal import.... (ie. pre-dated my E-bay addiction.... !).

Now that smaller sizes are available I think I might well return to the idea and have a bash at my intended experiment.

Though I am not sure if the way they work, (which depends on a fish retaining the hook and bait in its mouth and moving away) will deal will the problem of ejection by Carp simply blowing it out but without moving. We will have to see.

In passing, one of the tips I read about circle hooks is that because of the narrowness of the gap between hook point and shank you should treat them as if two sizes smaller than the marked size (which relates to the radius of the bend). So where you would be using a size 6 conventional hook you should use a size 2 circle hook etc. Certainly the size 10 circle hooks used in fly fishing to tie buzzers seem to be treated as equivalent to size 12 / 14 conventional hooks.

A few links / Quotes that may be of interest:

Quotes:

"Circle hooks will invariably hook fish in the corner of the mouth, making it much easier to release a fish with minimal handling and unharmed".

"For catch and return sea fishing there is no kinder or simpler type of hook to use. Hook holds are almost always in the jaw causing minimal damage and simplest unhooking. In fact in certain coastal areas Circle Hooks are a mandatory part of conservation policy".

"Circle hooks have been made compulsory in California as the only sort of hooks you are allowed to use for conservation protection reasons".

http://www.catchandreleasefound.org/fishstory6.html

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/cst/cst102901.html

http://www.ukshark.co.uk/ch.htm

That'l be a No then Evan!

Maybe.....