by Jeremy Wade
So how do you pick the best knot for each job? Seeing what other anglers use and recommend is a good place to start. But personal choices vary. Sometimes there’s a clear favorite; other times it’s harder to make a final choice.
It’s vitally important that you have confidence in your knots. With good knots it’s amazing how much strain you can put them under without them breaking. But you can only apply near-maximum strain with confidence if you know your knots are good. This confidence comes from using knots that you, personally, have used repeatedly and successfully. The thing is, it takes time to reach this point. Until then you’re trusting the experience and the word of others. But there is a shortcut to confidence.
One thing I sometimes do, with a knot I haven’t used before, is to test it first in a non-fishing context. With no fish on the line, this gives me the luxury of being able to test the knot to destruction, which can yield very useful and precise information. Rather than pulling against a spring balance (which is not designed to be abused by sudden release of tension), I usually hang a container such as a bucket on the line and add weight until the knot fails. After doing this a few times, it is theoretically possible to calculate knot strength as a percentage of line strength, with good knots giving a figure of 90 percent plus. But these figures may not be completely accurate, because actual line strength can be greater than what it says on the spool.
There’s a way to overcome this uncertainty, which gives very good comparative results. To do this, tie two identical hooks to either end of a short length of line, using two different knots. One hook then hangs on a fixed bar and the other supports the bucket. At some point as weight is added to the bucket, one knot will fail before the other. Repeat this a few times, varying which hook is up and which is down, and voilà: you have an objective measure of which knot is stronger.
This DIY lab stuff is probably a legacy of my background as a science teacher, back in a more carefree and hands-on era when teachers were expected to stab themselves in the finger to obtain blood for pupils to examine under a microscope. I don’t do these knot tests so much these days, since most knots in my repertoire are now very well tried and tested; and I don’t really recommend that you get involved with crashing buckets and invisibly fast-twanging fishing components unless you’re fully kitted out with protective eyewear, steel toecaps and standby paramedic. I include this personal background more to give a full picture of what my knot preferences are based on.
So what are my most trusted fishing knots?
If I were forced to pick just one knot to recommend, it would be the grinner, also known as the uni knot. This is my normal choice for attaching line to a hook or swivel. It can also be used to attach line to a spool. So just this one knot can cover most fishing needs.
To learn this or any knot, the internet is a great place to go, for videos, diagrams and animations. Just search using the name of the knot and start watching. Some videos are much better than others, and there can be different ways of getting the same result, so it’s worth watching a few. Some details of each knot may also vary slightly. Because these internet materials are so easy to access, I’ll confine myself here to a few notes and comments to supplement the video instructions.
The number of turns, or wraps, in a grinner will depend on the type and thickness of line. The lighter and more supple the line, the higher the number of turns. Five turns is a good guide for mono, give or take, and eight-plus turns for braid. For braid, you can also pass the line twice through the hook eye or swivel. Or, better still, if you don’t mind a bigger knot, tie the knot with a double line. To tighten, pull on the tag end first (the short end of line) to create a loose slip knot, then pull on the main line (known as the standing line) to slide this down. A well tied knot should be fully tightened and shouldn’t slip at all under further pressure. Even so, I don’t like to trim the tag end too close; I normally leave a short bristle as a precaution. The grinner’s one shortcoming is that it doesn’t work well with fluorocarbon.
An alternative for tying on hooks etc. is the half blood knot, or clinch knot. Before discovering the grinner I used this all the time, for monofilament, and I still use it if I have to knot heavy (80lb) mono. But under heavy load the half blood knot carries a risk of slippage. This can cause it to come undone, or it can result in the wraps strangulating the line running down the middle of the knot. If the line happens to break and comes in with a tapering curly pigtail on the end, strangulation is the cause. An improvement, to guard against slippage, is to add a tuck to the knot (see tucked half blood knot or improved clinch knot). Always wet the knot to help it tighten fully, and check that all the turns have bedded down neatly and evenly. Some anglers use contact adhesive on knots, but this is no substitute for tying the knot properly.
When using a braided line, it’s not always easy to tie a good half blood knot. If it hasn’t bedded down correctly the wraps can strangulate and weaken the line inside, once put to the test. So always tighten slowly, being sure to make the wraps bed down smoothly. Some anglers swear by a twenty-turn tucked half blood knot, tightened carefully, but on balance I much prefer a grinner for braid. Having said that, I once used a five-turn untucked half blood knot, made with the end of the 90lb braid doubled over, to haul up Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) in Trondheim Fjord, Norway. This was attached by a swivel to thirty feet of 300lb nylon rubbing trace (Greenland sharks will often roll up the line, abrading it with their sandpapery skin), which connected to another thirty feet of coated wire cable. Presenting bait on the bottom in tidal flows at such extreme depth (nearly 2,000 feet) would have been impossible with main line that was any thicker. My 400-pounder was actually small as Greenland sharks go; fish of more than 2,000 pounds are possible. With fish this size you have to have faith in your set-up, and in this case the knot was tried and trusted by the skipper and his deck hand, so I was happy to stick with it. In fact if something is used by an experienced guide, that generally counts as a very strong recommendation. It’s also the only time I might trust someone else to tie the knot for me.
A very good alternative for tying to an eyed hook or swivel, especially with not-too-heavy mono, is the palomar, but I rarely use it because of my confidence in the grinner. The palomar must be closed and tightened very carefully, however. If it isn’t, there’s a tendency for it not to tighten evenly, leaving a loose loop within the knot. Such a knot will fail long before the properly tied version. But tied properly, the palomar is a very strong knot, thanks largely to the double line gripping the hook eye. It is also very neat and compact.
Another good knot for attaching a hook is the knotless knot, or no-knot knot. Because of how this is tied (it’s completed by passing the standing line through the eye) it can’t be tied to the end of the reel line; it can only be used on the end of a leader. Although this is normally used for carp fishing, with the tag end left long as a ready-made ‘hair’ for a hair rig, there’s no reason it can’t be used in other contexts, as long as it’s tied with an appropriate line that doesn’t loosen or unravel.
And that’s it for most normal angling. If you know all four of these you’re really well set up.
For some of the fishing I do, there are a few more things on the list:
For attaching multi-strand wire (coated or uncoated) to a hook or swivel I use double-barrel crimps, closed with proper crimping pliers. (The pliers should be positioned not quite flush with the end of the crimp but slightly short, by the merest fraction.) These are far superior to ordinary cylindrical crimps; in head-to-head tests the cylindrical versions failed first every time. The crimp should be a comfortable sliding fit on the wire; not too tight and not too loose.
I also use these crimps for heavy (100–175lb) nylon and fluoro, for which they tend to do a better job than knots. First, I make sure the end of the line is cut squarely, rather than at an angle. Then, having fed the line through one barrel of the crimp, through the eye of the hook or swivel, and back through the other barrel of the crimp,
I quickly melt the very end of the line with a match or a lighter, then tap it squarely against a hard surface. What I don’t want is a blob on the end but something like the outward-tapering head of a nail. I then position this so it’s neatly tucked inside the crimp, slide down the loop to the desired size, and reach for the pliers. In this case I don’t compress the crimp along its whole length; instead, I stop a little short of each end, to give a slightly flared appearance. In this way there is no hard corner of metal that might damage the line.
These crimps also work well for lighter fluoro. My 112-pound Nile perch from Murchison Falls in Uganda, taken on a lure from the shore, was caught using a 40lb fluoro leader, crimped at one end to a swivel and the other end to a lure clip.
Now for something that I’ve increasingly needed to do: join a braided main line to a leader or longer-than-rod-length ‘top shot’ of thick fluorocarbon (or sometimes nylon). By doing this you combine the benefits of both these materials–provided you can join them together effectively.
The knot I use for this, the FG knot, is a relatively new one for me, but it has rapidly become a firm favorite. This gives your set-up the abrasion resistance of mono/fluoro where it matters most (the last few yards, where it is most likely to encounter rocks or roots), combined with the thin diameter, suppleness and general user-friendliness of zero-stretch braid. And it does it without any weak point.
Unlike the traditional and more bulky Allbright, which requires the fluoro/mono to be doubled over, the FG knot requires no doubling. For this reason it easily passes through the rod rings and even onto the reel, so your leader can be as long as you like. Not only that, the FG has a knot strength of 100 percent. If you hook an unyielding snag, the line will (eventually) break somewhere else–not at the knot.
The FG knot works on the same principle as a Chinese finger trap. This is a woven cylinder that gets narrower when it is stretched–so the harder you pull the tighter your finger is gripped. In the case of the knot, the more tension it is subjected to, the tighter the wraps of braided line grip the fluoro or mono.
There are a few different ways to arrive at the same result. I prefer to have the braid under tension (putting the rod in a holder is good for this) with the tag end in my mouth, and to build the knot by manipulating the tag end of the fluoro, keeping the turns tight together. Once I’ve made twenty to thirty turns I pinch the final turns and lock the knot with two half hitches over both fluoro and braid. (My preference is to tie the half hitches in alternate directions: over-under-over-under…) Then I pull on both leader and main line to make sure the turns are tight. At this point the braid should darken in color as it tightens.
To finish the knot I tie another four half hitches, continuing the same over-under sequence, then snip off the tag end of the fluoro, close to the knot. Some people leave it there, but I prefer to tie another four half hitches around the braid above the fluoro to create a taper, and to finish with a three-turn locking knot. (You start this like a half hitch, but pass the tag end three times through the loop you have made before tightening.) Don’t trim the braid tight to the knot but leave a short tag end.
The first time I tried the FG knot was in the brutal, brain numbing heat of high summer in the tropical north of Australia in 2015. For a few years I’d been an enthusiastic user of the PR knot, which looks superficially the same and whose 100 percent knot strength I had thoroughly verified, mostly on sunken Amazonian trees, in between catching red-tail catfish. But the PR is a bit of a performance to tie, because it requires the tag end of the braid to be loaded onto a weighted bobbin, which you then twirl around the thicker leader material. The FG is easier to tie when you’re out and about, on a tipping boat for instance.
Ashley, our boat skipper and guide, demonstrated the FG-tying technique and I tried to fix it in my mind by doing it a couple of times under supervision. As with any knot, there’s a satisfaction in executing it well, and in the aesthetics of the finished product, which reinforces the learning process. And although this was a new knot for me, I instinctively knew I could trust it, and Ashley’s endorsement of it, in the severe test that I was hoping to put it to.
I was after a Queensland groper (Epinephelus lanceolatus, and what non-Aussies call a grouper) from the jagged terrain around a small rocky outcrop off an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. That meant presenting a bait within sight of the bottom and being ready to hang on for dear life if something bigger than me rose to the temptation, and then tried to get back down among all that sharp-edged underwater architecture.
Normally I don’t use livebait, which might seem a bit quaint and anachronistic since we all happily poison fish all the time, by poisoning the water they live in with our industrial and domestic waste products. But there are times when I make an exception and this was one of them. Even so, it was a case of just nicking the hook through the skin in front of the dorsal fin and lowering the fish over the side. The boat’s sonar said a depth of sixty feet, so I paid out ten feet less than that, then quickly engaged the drag.
The low point of the next couple of days was a record-breaking on-camera swearathon when a big fish slipped the hook. When it took, I jammed my thumb against the spool for extra braking, but the rotation stripped the protective sticking-plaster I’d applied and started to burn through my skin. To the puzzlement of the crew I pushed through the pain barrier and managed to stop the fish reaching the bottom. It was safely up in the water, but some way off, when the hook pulled. I predicted that could be our last chance, and so it turned out for the rest of that day. But the strength of the FG knot was beyond doubt, and seared into my memory.
The next day was our last one there. On our way out to the fishing spot, we’d planned to do some boat-to-boat filming, but the water was too bumpy. Arriving well ahead of the smaller second boat, we decided to prospect the rocky shore of the main island, in case Plan A was now truly blown. As we rounded a rocky headland we spotted something blue on the shore ahead. As we got closer we saw it was a washed-up cooler box. Someone had just joked that the next thing we’d see would be Tom Hanks running down the beach when, to our amazement, a nearly naked man materialized from a tiny patch of shade and came running down the beach. Blinking in disbelief, we watched as he started getting into the sea, so desperate was he to reach us.
A couple of minutes later, as he chugged huge gulps of water in our boat, it emerged that this real-life castaway had been lost here for two days. He’d moored his boat on the far side of the island, gone for a walk, and not found his way back. At first he’d not panicked. He slept out and collected sea urchins to keep up his fluid intake. But then dehydration and heat exhaustion set in. By day, he couldn’t stay out for long in the fierce sunlight, and he couldn’t navigate the rocks, mangroves, and croc-inhabited creeks by night. Even so, he thought he’d worked out where he was–but when the sun rose after the second night it was on the opposite horizon to where he was expecting it. By this point he was close to the maximum survival time without water for such conditions, despite being a very tough outdoorsman. If we hadn’t shown up, he wouldn’t have made it. And if that fish hadn’t slipped the hook, we wouldn’t have shown up…
With our rescued castaway on his way in the second boat to the shelter of our camp, we went fishing. At first everything was quiet as before–but suddenly the bait was seized. Again I hung on for dear life as the rod was wrenched down. Again I managed to stop the fish’s dive and this time we pulled the anchor, fired up the engine, and used the boat to tow it away from the outcrop. On the sonar we watched the jagged bottom slowly transition into flat and smooth, and I could afford to ease off a little. But nervous tension was still running high, and it didn’t ease until many minutes later, when the fish was finally in my hands, as I stood chest-deep in the water with it, on a small rock shelf at the water’s edge. A huge-mouthed beast with spikes running along its dorsal fin like six-inch nails, it was longer than me and would have weighed about 270lb. The FG knot needed no further recommendati
on. I was just curious about its name and origin. In the case of the PR knot I believe the initials are those of its inventor, and I asked Ashley if it was the same with the FG. He paused for a moment and said, ‘I think it’s just because it’s a very good knot.’
One old and sometimes useful knot, which is also very neat and pleasing to tie, is the blood knot (as distinct from the half blood knot). It’s for joining two pieces of line of similar diameter, but in practice that need rarely arises. I used it a few times on my early travels, when I wasn’t carrying spare line and I was reduced to adding bits of old line as backing. You could also, in theory, use it if a fish takes you through a snag and you have to cut off and rejoin the pieces, but it’s rather fiddly. A double grinner would be much better, and will also join lines of quite different diameter, as well as joining nylon to braid. Experiment to find the correct number of turns for each line, and see what lies right.
A very simple but useful knot is the sliding stop knot. Hold a short piece of line alongside the main line and tie an overhand knot in this, with the working end of this line also passing around the main line. Then make some more turns around both lines by going through the loop a few more times, pull tight, and trim the tag ends no shorter than an eighth of an inch. This knot should be tight enough to stay in place, but with enough give to slide when pushed. It’s mainly for fishing with a sliding float, at depths greater than the rod length, and should be used in conjunction with a bead; otherwise the knot will pass through the hole in the float.
One trace material not mentioned so far is single-strand wire. This has the benefits of being thin and tough, but against that it is very stiff and it weakens dramatically if it becomes kinked. It’s useful for short traces when lure fishing for toothy fish, and I’ve also caught large bull sharks on it when using a circle hook. (With the circle hook lodged in the corner of the mouth, the thin wire is kept away from the teeth.) Attachment to the hook or swivel is by a haywire twist. With practice this is very neat and effective, and it’s a very useful addition to a predator angler’s repertoire.
