Unleash Your Inner Wind Knots
Things could be worse. A nice brook trout could have parted with your favorite quill-body CDC wonder fly along with some expensive fluorocarbon tippet.
A single fly and a wind knot messing with your temper is one thing. A wind knot involving a nymph, dropper fly, weight, and indicator is something else entirely, and can make one go postal.
I could provide photos of my more gnarly tangles, but these types of images are already burned into most of our minds. It is a wonder we rig our leaders this way at all for the trouble it causes, but there doesn’t seem to be a more efficient or enlightened way of getting the fish food down where it belongs.
Better casting also helps. Vertical, tight-loop casts are an anathema, unless you want shrapnel with a sharp point heading toward your ear. Casts that keep the forward and backward casting planes separated, such as the elliptical Belgian cast, work fairly well to keep all components of indicator nymph fishing synchronized and safe, even with a diving tuck, pile, curve, or other specialized hybrid cast applied to the business end of the line.
Sooner or later though, the best-laid plans go awry and the universes of the fly, indicator, and weight collapse. To someone new to indicator or nymph fishing, these tangles are serious issues and some may warrant paid counseling or psychiatric services. Some tippet surgery might even be in order, including removing the fly, weights, and indicator and starting over. Remember this: If you are alone on a river, only the fish can hear you scream.
In time, though, even these terrible tangles become manageable, if not tolerable. Doing nothing is surprisingly effective. Call this the Zen of knot management. Stare at the knot long enough and the logic of the tangle begins to surface. Be the knot, if you will.
Often, there is one loop within another loop that needs to be pulled back through. Call this the alpha loop, core loop, loop nexus, or the mother of all loops. Or don’t call it anything. It is surprising how quickly some of the worst knots sometimes fall apart in moments when you discover the crux of the problem. When you learn this trick, the other complexities in the universe seem to fade. You might even tackle quantum mechanics next or learn how to kill crabgrass.
If the knot doesn’t come apart after ten minutes, try a more Western approach. Methodically remove one piece of terminal gear at a time to untangle the knot. If you end up removing all the flies, tippet, weight, and indicator, you’re way too impatient. Go back to the Zen approach and think about the knot some more, or consider another way of fishing, like dry-fly fishing with a single fly. Maybe you’ll learn how to look for signs of fish through the water—which is probably what we all should be doing anyway—or take up amateur entomology.
Some of the worst wind knots aren’t the result of casting at all. They happen when you lift the end of the line out of the water to look for knots or remove debris from the hook. Suddenly the flies, weight, and indicator conspire to unnerve you by twisting around each other. The more you try to control the twisting, the worse it gets, sort of like Chinese handcuffs.
Learn line management. Lift the leader out of the water slowly, making sure one piece of leader doesn’t wrap around another, or inevitably the weight and the indicator will spin around each other, turning a simple fly change into a nightmare. The amount of care and deliberation needed to retrieve a tricked-out leader—and return to fishing in a reasonable amount of time—isn’t like what you’d need to remove a warhead from a nuclear missile, but if you possess such skills, use them.
This leads me to wonder why these knots are called wind knots in the first place. Why not casting knots, fisher knots, rod knots, quantum knots, or idiot knots? I guess we have a tendency to blame our problems on something else, or on some uncontrollable natural force like the wind, instead of on the incompetence we all share and can never seem to shake completely. Either you get pissed, or you can get humored.
Einstein said, “Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy”—and, we might add, so does unleashing our inner wind knots.
Toney J. Sisk is a professional writer. He lives near Seattle, Washington.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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