Unleash Your Inner Wind Knots
Anyone can tie a knot. The Internet teaches you how to tie everything from a simple surgeon’s knot to a brain-freezing Bimini twist. Unraveling the ones nature ties as we cast, however, is what separates cool and experienced fly fishers from angry amateurs.
Whether your fly is alone on the leader or accompanied by another fly, some weight, an indicator, or maybe a third fly, nature finds a way to mess with your fishing. Nature’s knots range from the overhand granny knot to an insane nylon tangle. They make you suspect that if there is intelligent design in the universe, then there is also an equally powerful and devious force conspiring to waste your time onstream.
The basic overhand wind knot is all too familiar. Like mosquitoes, these pesky knots never seem to go away. Improved casting helps to a degree, but improved casting means tighter loops, especially with stiff fly rods, and the continued threat of wind knots. Regard these knots as gentle reminders of our humble origins as fly fishers.
With age and experience, fly fishers acquire a sense of when a knot might have crept onto their leader. Maybe the forward cast lacked aerodynamics, producing a faint whistle over your head. If you’re fishing at night, the whistling acquires the quality of a bat flying around your head. Some other intuitive moment may tell you something is wrong, sort of like knowing when a trout has taken an upstream nymph. Well, not exactly like that, but you get the idea.
Why wind knots happen in the first place is usually well-understood and explained to new casters. The forward cast isn’t accelerating correctly. The fly is being cast too directly into the wind. The fly is too heavy for the tippet—my flies always seem to be two to three sizes too big for the tippet. In other words, somewhere along the line, you’ve made a bad decision.
Maybe. But I have my own theories about wind knots based upon years of careful observation and introspection—theories no one wants you to know about. First, there is a statistical relationship between the occurrence of wind knots and the proximity of a trophy fish, even if you don’t see the fish. Something within tells you to hurry up your casting and wave your arms and rod in contorted waves, leading to untold leader issues—and few fish. Call this subliminal stupidity.
Second, wind knots tend to accumulate toward evening, when the light leaves the water, the sky acquires an olive hue, and it becomes impossible to untangle any knot you might discover.
Baetis can come off in droves. You fool a few small fish with your fly when a monster pokes his nose out of the water. The perfect fly is on a hair trigger. Then you discover a wind knot, and suddenly you feel alone with a beast of a fish—and your incompetence. We’ve all been there.
Now the fatal choice: Fish with the wind knot, hoping the 50 percent reduction
in tippet strength is enough to bring in a fish you’ve only seen in magazines—or waste extraordinarily precious minutes repairing a tippet in fading light? You know if you move from your spot you’ll probably spook the fish 99 percent of the time anyway. Doing the math here sometimes helps. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Wind knots just happen. Get over it.
Usually, the most simple wind knots can be undone without too much trouble. Even the tighter ones that shamefully go unnoticed for a dozen casts can often be wiggled free.
Sometimes a wind knot fools you. I’ve been experimenting with double and triple surgeon’s knots to replace the blood knot for smaller tippet sections. A blood knot is sleek and beautiful in its symmetry; a surgeon’s knot is comparatively bulky, maybe a little ugly. The trouble is, complicated wind knots sometimes look like an amorphous triple surgeon’s knot and thus can be left undetected for an hour, sometimes for days of casting. Occasionally, I’ve had to stare at a wind knot for more than a few minutes to decide if it is indeed a natural wind knot or man-made.
Fortunately, pushing on one end of the line with a pair of tweezers often does the trick on these compound wind knots. The last resort for extremely tight knots is more surgical: a thrust of the hook point into the guts of the knot while it sits carefully poised on my thumbnail. At times, I even manage to avoid piercing my thumb with this trick.
With luck, the leader won’t be pinched, kinked, or weakened. Usually the tippet is okay, but a tug on the leader can indicate whether to continue fishing, or to sit down and ponder one’s place in this comedic universe while repairing the tippet.
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.
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