When you spend as much time on the water as we do you come against specific problems time and again. Eventually, you start developing creative ways to overcome these relatively common annoyances. We are going to share with you three fishing hacks that we’ve continuously found come in handy when your out fishing and have no intention of returning to civilization anytime soon -or even when you are cleaning up afterwards.
Bring a Dental Floss Container
This first hack will require you to grab a dental floss container. Those larger circle containers work best. Just open it up and take the spool of floss out of the container. You can then put your hook within for an easy way to hold your hook while you cinch down your knots. This means you don’t have to worry about the hook coming back and biting you. You can then conveniently use the floss cutter to trim your tags.
Another cool hack: apparently, you can also use the floss to clean your teeth. Crazy stuff.
Homemade Descaler
Our second fishing hack is great for pan fisherman who needs to do a lot of descaling and find themselves with a broken tool. You will only need two or three bottle caps, a handle, and a couple of screws.
The First thing you are going to want to do is pre-drill a small hole in the center of your bottle caps. Then take your screw, put it through the cap, and drill it into the wood, the bottom side of the cap out. Add a few caps to add the width of your descaling surface.
This hack is just that simple!
The Safety Pin Rod Tip
We have all broken a rod tip at one point or another. Dumb mistakes can often ruin a whole trip. This third hack will show you how you can quickly and cheaply fix the tip, so you don’t lose any time on the water. We are merely going to use a safety pin, some fly thread, and some pliers to make a new rod tip.
- Grip and then bend the safety pin loop side to about 90 degrees.
- Clip the opposite end of the pin off (the ends with the hood and tip)
- Pinch the remaining pin legs together as much as possible
- Barrel wrap the pin to the rod with your thread.
- Use a knot and/or fly cement or super glue to hold it in place.
Use Stainless Steel to Freshen Up
You may love the smell of fish, but likely many of your friends or family don’t have the same appreciation. If you are investing in a new sink or appliances anytime soon, you might consider doing your loved ones a favor and opting for some stainless steel.
Soap and water will clean your hands, but very often can’t completely remove fish odors. However, if you brush your hands and arms against some stainless steel, a chemical reaction takes place. This response eliminates many of the scents from your skin.
This can be done with something as simple as a stainless steel knife and will work with other smells like garlic and onions as well. This is pretty much the ultimate seafood cook hack.
Cut Braid With a Lighter
The last fishing hack on our list is using a lighter to cut braid.This is really simple and can actually improve your knot resilience. The small melted knob at the tag end can also help stop your knots from slipping. Try it once or twice, and you may wonder why you weren’t doing this years ago.
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