SALMON-FISHING ADVICE

PART THREE: WIGGLING

The much admired Michael Evans shares the tactics that have helped him catch more than 3,000 salmon

Do you dare use a single hook for salmon? Michael Evans recommends it

I FINALLY WENT TOTALLY SINGLE in 2020.

I became an avid wiggler a short time later. The one rather led to the other, as you will see...

I should stress, I have been single before: on and off, for many years, particularly in Russia, where being single was a distinct advantage.

But for some reason, I always lapsed when I got back to the UK or anywhere else where I was allowed not to be single.

Hooks, of course.

I always seemed to hold the belief that two was better than one. And three? Well, better still. Maybe a habit from too much pike fishing when I was younger?

In Russia, in the 1990s, where the rule was single or double barbless, a lot of folk, me included, used small Loop doubles for a while. Until I realised that a small double, out of the back of a tube-fly, has such a reduced gape that it was failing to hook fish more often than not.

Small tied doubles (and by small, I mean size 8 and down) on the other hand, were okay because they did not have to slide up a plastic sleeve. But small flies are not much good in big coloured water.

I tried bigger doubles, but they looked... well, just wrong.

“Russia was where you could experiment – prove a theory”

I tried long-shank fly-dressing doubles, but they looked worse and trying to straighten the upturned eye was not easy.

I tried a Bartleet single for one day, in 1994, losing, I think, six fish in a row while filming a sequence for my Salmon Fishing & Spey Casting films with Pete Durgerion. He still has footage of me losing my temper on the riverbank.