Safe & Painless Hook Removal
From A Human

One day it happens to all anglers. A hook does its job and hooks up, but not to the fish. Fly-fishing contains many opportunities to dig a fly into various parts of your body. Fortunately most of the hooks trout fishers use are small.

Removing a hook that has been embedded over the barb, but not back out through the skin, is relatively easy:

• Make a loop about eight- to 10-cm long, in strong line, 6 kilo (10 to 12lb) plus, and pass it over the eye of the hook, and up to the top of the hook bend.
• Push down on the eye of the hook so the eye of the hook touches the skin.
• With a sudden, strong tug on the line loop, pull up, and away from the eye. The hook should come out the way it went in, and because it will curve out the same way it went in the barb should not catch. Most of the time there is no pain.

Another very effective method is to use a pair of long-nosed pliers or your forceps you use for getting hooks out of fish:

• As above press down on the eye of the hook.
• Grasp the hook with the point of the pliers or forceps at the top of the hook bend
• Grasping the handle of the pliers or forceps with the thumb facing upwards, twist the wrist sharply and firmly towards the eye of the hook so that the palm finishes up facing down. The hook will be out.

If the hook has gone in and then out through skin you can cut off, or flatten the barb, and pull the hook back out the way it went in.

Another method if the hook has gone through skin and back out again is to use bolt cutters, or similar, to cut off the barb and point and ease the hook back out the way it went in.

Bad, bad Advice

Some have recommended pushing a deeply embedded hook right through the skin and out again, then cutting off the hook barb. In general this is bad advice. The further pain will make the area go into shock, you risk puncturing blood vessels, it is extremely painful and it is an all-round silly thing to do. Big hooks, deeply embedded, are best left to trained medical care.

If you need a good reason to use barbless hooks, the first time you have to remove a hook from yourself will lower your resistance to the change. More painfully, if you hook up on two or more hooks on a treble hook into a part of your person, you will change all your lures to single hooks, and so you should!

A quick short story:

A few years ago I stuck a fly-hook into a friend’s throat (don’t ask). I said I would remove it using the forceps method, but he thought he needed to see a doctor. So hook still in his throat we drove the hour back to my house, and he and his wife set off for the hour’s drive to the after-hours on-duty doctor.

They waited another hour and a half to see the doctor, and yes, you have guessed what happened.

I asked him how the doctor had removed it, and he sheepishly told me he had used the quick flick with a pair of forceps method, dabbed on some antiseptic, extracted a heap of dollars out of his wallet even faster than he extracted the hook, and sent him on his way. Total time in the surgery, 2 or 3 minutes!

It nearly choked me, but I managed to suppress the urge to yell “told you so”, so he is still a friend.

If you have a couple of hooks in you from a set of trebles, go to the doctor, pay $200 or more for after-hours fees, and have him dig around. While he is doing that and extracting money from your wallet say, “Bish I am so sorry, I will never use trebles ever again, never!”