A good friend and longtime reader of our blog got in touch this week with a question. We’re paraphrasing, but it was basically…
“I keep reading on your blog that you should keep your rod tip low when you fight fish. I’ve always been told to keep my rod tip high when I fight fish. What’s the deal?”
We’ll do our best to answer today!
Rod Tip Height
First, let’s be clear about what we mean by the height of the rod tip. Imagine that there’s a fish directly in front of you. If you’re holding your rod perfectly vertical, that’s the highest your rod tip could be. If you now point the rod directly at the fish, that’s the lowest your rod tip could be. Today all we’re talking about is different positions of the rod along that plane. We’re not talking at all about the side pressure that can be created by lowering your rod to the left or right – side pressure is a topic for another day.
High Rod Tip
When your rod tip is high, pressure on the fish tends to bend the tip section of the rod – the tip is softer so it’s going to bend first. This absorbs a lot of the shock of the fight – if the fish pulls or shakes its head, the tip bends quickly and easily, smoothing things out.
This is exactly what you want when you’re fishing smaller flies and/or lighter tippets. The shock absorption of the tip can keep your tippet from breaking (hence the statement that rods with softer tips can ‘protect light tippets’). Smoothing out the pull can also help prevent smaller hooks from bending and/or pulling out of the fish. With lighter tippets and smaller hooks, a high rod tip helps the tip absorb the shock of the fight.
Low Rod Tip
When you’re fighting bigger and/or stronger fish with bigger flies and heavier tippets, a high rod tip will also help absorb the shock of the fight – but now this can be a bad thing! With bigger fish you need to pull harder on them to land them, and if your rod tip is high a bunch of the work that you’re doing to pull on the fish is absorbed by the tip of the rod.
As you lower your rod tip towards the fish, the rod bends further down towards the butt – that’s just how the geometry of the situation plays out. The butt section is much stronger, so much more of the force that you’re exerting on the rod gets transferred to the fish. Again in this situation we’re talking bigger fish, bigger flies and heaver tippets – we want to pull harder on the fish, and the problem of pulling the hook or breaking the tippet just isn’t as much of an issue.
Prove It To Yourself
Here’s an eye-opening little exercise you can do with a buddy to show the impact of your rod angle on the pressure exerted on the fish. We’ve explained a similar idea in a past post on how to set the hook on a bonefish.
- String up a rod with a line and a leader but no fly.
- Grab onto the end of the leader and wrap it around your hand if you like.
- Have a buddy grab the rod, keeping the handle vertical, and walk away from you until the tip starts to bend. Feel the pressure on the line – it’ll be light and smooth.
- Now have your buddy lower the rod tip towards you, maintaining the same pressure on the rod, but taking a few steps back to maintain to tension on the line.
What you’ll find is that with the rod tip low, even when your buddy swears she’s not pulling any harder, you’ll feel much more pressure on the line. That’s because the strong butt section of the rod is now loaded. This is bad if you’re trying not to break 7x tippet, but good if you’re trying to land a king salmon.
There you have it! Thanks for the great question, Ric. And for all our readers out there, if we can answer any questions for you please don’t hesitate to comment on this post – questions like this one make excellent ‘blog fodder’.
Don’t forget that high rod is the perfect way to to break a rod when fighting big fish. When fishing saltwater this is one of the most common ways to break a rod. When you see a video of a guy pulling on a fish and the rod is doubled over in an upside down U, the next frame is usually a casatrophic break. Once your get the rod above 45* to the fish you are actually putting LESS pressure on the fish. If you want to visualize putting lots of pressue on a fish it will be with the tip very straight and the bend in the mid and butt section and your elbows bent and close to your side.
A good way to demonstrate this is to tie your tippet to a stable object like a nail in your work bench or your hitch. have about 10 feet of fly line out and remove the slack while point the rod at the nail. Raise the rod around 20* to 30* and take a step back. Notice how the mid and butt section of the rod starts bending. Then take another step or two back there should be a significant bend in the butt section of the rod.
After typing all of that I found a nice article by Andy Mill.
http://www.floridasportsman.com/2012/06/12/tarpon-on-fly/
Great comments – thanks for the input!
Thanks for the tip! I usually streamer fish, so I tend to fight with a low rod tip. This is the same reason I was consistently breaking 7X fishing tricos on a spring creek. Good ol’ physics at it again!
Good “tips”. Well done. People definitely need to practice this and have the experience to know when to do either one.
Tip high also helps the fish to jump. Low tip also puts more line in the water creating more drag for the fish to fight. You can also change the direction the fish is moving by fishing low with the rod in the opposite direction the fish is swimming.
I will high tip a rod at Kiritimati on the bones when I’m fishing areas with a lot of coral bombies as it gives me a better chance to keep the line away from the coral.
I find that the most effective way to do it is have your tip up high before you actually have a fish on the line. That way, the initial impact isn’t as intense, potentially saving the line in the event of a larger, more violent fish. Once it’s hooked, it’s possible to decide which position is best for landing it.
However if you completely invert the rod that the bottom of the rod is now pointing towards the sky you can usually turn the fish around if they are running. Try it,will blow your mind.