I'm Gordon Vanderpool from Franklin, North Carolina with Turning Stones Fly Fishing, and I'm going to give a few tips on how to choose the proper hook sizes for trout. What you're going to need is access to an experienced guide. Say you're fishing with a streamer, that's like a woolybugger. You're trying to imitate some type of minnow in the stream that's swimming around. So, that could be like a size six, or a size eight, and that gauge is a little bit bigger. And, if you're fishing like with midges, which are really small, that could be a size 18, 20, 22, 24. The hook size matches up with what kind of insect or minnow you're trying to imitate. Like, Mustad I use for certain applications, Tiemco, which is a really good hook, super sharp. So, if I'm going to be doing a lot of nymph fishing, I tie a lot of my nymphs on Tiemco hooks. And, there's another one, it's from the Czech Republic, it's called Knapek, very sharp hook, no barb, barbless, protects the trout. If your hook's not sharp, you could have a lot of hookups where trout get off. See, when we hook a fish, we got to keep tension on the line. And, with a good sharp hook, you know, it's going to get further into the lip of the trout. And, if the hook's not quite as sharp, not as smooth of a transition into the lip, you're going to lose a lot of fish. Some guys here recently are getting into, like, the whole bleeding bait kind of thing, and it's mostly with streamers. So, if we're going to do a streamer on a size six or an eight, we may get a red hook with that real bright red paint on it. And, that kind of gives the imitation that that's a crippled or a bleeding fish, that that big predator fish is trying to get. Even with the nymphing, like a lot of guys will tie what's called an attractor nymph. It's a little bit more advanced, it's a nymph that is something that draws the attention of the trout, and makes him bite it, not necessarily because he's feeding on it. He sees a bright hook, with maybe a little bit of dubbing and a real bright red color around it, and he just eats it, just because he doesn't know what it is. And, those are some tips and techniques on how to choose the proper size for a hook in fly fishing.
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