Tangles and snags: preventing and undoing them

0:00This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast we'll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and Tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing Tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It's only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos because of your support. So we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA rods, lines, and flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about the simple method of fly fishing. Hey, Tenkara anglers. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the Tenkara Cast. It's a pleasure to see so many people coming back and listening to most of the episodes that I'm putting out. I'm super stoked about the level of support. and I'm especially thankful for the great feedback I got on last week's episode on techniques about Tenkara.

1:04I was a little afraid it was going to be a little bit too long. It was almost an hour long where I covered the main techniques that I used to present flies with a Tenkara rod and it was a really good overview. I think I tried to give as much information as I could. I was afraid it was going to be a little too much information just me talking here But I immediately started getting some really great comments from listeners who emailed us or left their messages on Facebook, on our Facebook page, or on our website, letting us know how they immediately used the information that I provided on the podcast and caught fish because of it. I could not have been happier to get an email or emails from customers saying that they listened to it and they kind of put what I had shared in practice. That level of feedback is awesome. It kind of gives me an idea of what kind of information you're looking for, and it's very useful.

2:07So if you have any more feedback, definitely send us an email, share on our Facebook page or on our website, tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast. It's always really good to know how you're using the information, what you're liking, what you're not liking about the podcast. And if you do like it, I'd love to have your review in iTunes. If you can go to iTunes and if that's how you listen to our episode, if you can take a few moments and leave us a review in there, that's super helpful. So I really appreciate if you can take the time to do that. But I was kind of wondering, you know, what else can I share that will be useful to your fishing? Especially now we're kind of like on the shoulder season, you know, the weather is starting to kind of change a little bit. It's starting to get cold in some states. You know, the winter kind of slows down our fly fishing quite a bit, so we don't get out quite as much.

3:08But we still have some time of good fishing ahead of us. And I thought it would be nice for me to share some information that will be immediately applicable to your fishing, hopefully. And if you haven't listened to last week's episode, go ahead and take a listen. It's a little longer, so maybe you can listen to part of it. one day and part of it to another day. But the last week's episode on Tenkara techniques was pretty well received, it seems like. Today, I'm going to be sharing tips on preventing snags, freeing the line when it gets snagged on your rod, on trees, and in obstacles in the water. And overall, just kind of how to reduce the kind of frustration that comes with getting snagged when you're fishing. Snags happen to the best of us. No matter how much experience you have, you will occasionally lose the fly. You will occasionally get caught in a tree.

4:12But the good thing is that it happens less frequently with experience. And my goal here is to kind of steepen your learning curve, kind of give you a lot of information so that hopefully you don't have to learn all of this stuff just by experience because that takes a while sometimes. So hopefully I'll share some information on things that I have observed that work well when I'm fishing that kind of keep me from getting caught on trees behind me, trees in front of me, obstacles in the water, and getting caught on the rod itself. And then when I do get caught, one of the things that I realized recently is that I'm actually really good a freeing my fly, not always, but in a lot of cases, freeing my fly from where you got caught. And hopefully what I'll share will be useful to you as well. So I'm going to cover these. I kind of broke it down into three kind of main categories. First of all, how to prevent snags, because I think if we can prevent getting caught on trees in front of us, behind us, and that kind of thing will kind of reduce our frustration quite a bit.

5:23The second one is, you know, sometimes, especially when you're beginning casting with the tenkara rod, you might be getting caught on the rod itself. So you cast forward and the line gets caught. And it occasionally even happened to me. But how do we prevent that? And how do we get the line back without getting, like, the tangle too messy? And the third one is going to be how to free your fly from snags. So let's go ahead and delve into this. Let's go ahead and dig deep and see how to prevent the frustration that comes from getting caught and how to free your line. First of all, in terms of prevention of snags, the main thing is to be aware of your surroundings. and this is something that with time it starts becoming much more second nature and I cannot overemphasize the importance of being aware of what's around you when you're going fishing with a long tenkara rod in your line and your flies but it's by far the foundation of the whole thing here how to be aware of everything, what kind of trees are around us, what is around us like how tall are the trees around us and above us and that kind of thing.

6:42So when you get to a spot, let's say we get to a spot on a river and there's going to be trees. Some places we're lucky there's not a whole lot of trees, but we have to just kind of be aware of what is around us. And we might have canopy that is like right overhead. We might have kind of medium-sized trees right behind us. Sometimes we have very tall trees behind us. And then we're going to have trees in front of us. So just kind of looking around and seeing what is around us. Usually when I get to a spot and I'm going to fish or when I'm teaching somebody, we get to a little pool and we see a pool in front of us. And a lot of times we're kind of so focused on that pool where the fish is going to be that we kind of forget to look around us. And my main recommendation is as soon as you kind of take the step and you found the firm footing where you're going to be casting from, go ahead and take a look around. First, you're going to look in front of you. Where are the trees in front of you? Then you're going to look over your head, like right above.

7:44Is there any canopy that's coming above my head? And then I'm right-handed, so usually because I'm casting with my right hand, I'm going to look over to my right shoulder, like at a kind of diagonal level. Is there any kind of branches that are coming over my right side and above me a little bit? And then I'll look behind me. what kind of tree is behind me. If I'm left-handed, I'll probably look the other way, just to my left, kind of like over my left shoulder and then behind me. So what that does is it allows us to kind of determine what kind of casting we're going to be doing and what kind of adaptations we might have to do with our casting. So the typical Tenkara Cast is an overhead cast where you're going to move the rod up to a vertical position, typically shooting the line up and then you're going to move the rod forward and down, like your rod tip down. So it's this 12 o'clock. If you're looking, let's say you are observing my arm and you're on my right side, for you, it would be like at 2 o'clock.

8:51So 12 o'clock to 2 o'clock position. Now, that's the typical cast when I'm going to go straight overhead. That's my favorite cast. I typically try to do that as much as I can. But when I become aware of what is around me, I might have to tweak my casting a little bit. So first of all, become aware of what's around you and then adapt to it. The main thing is going to be looking for the openings. Where are the openings that are going to minimize the tangles that I'm going to have? Where are the spots where I can cast and not get caught on trees? one of the beautiful things about tenkara is that we have this fixed length of rod fixed length of line we're not stripping an extra few feet of line here and there and it's also much easier to control the rod than it is to control line because line is going to be flailing all over the place so the cool thing about it is if I make my rod travel in a certain direction the line is typically going to follow that really well and it's going to be easy to kind of keep the rod and the line in this kind of path that if I'm casting into openings, I'm going to not get caught quite as much.

10:07So let's say, let's talk about specifically what kind of tweaks I'm going to do to my cast depending on the obstacles that I have over my head or around me and behind me. First of all, if there's trees that are kind of sending branches over my head, and let's say it's kind of like a relatively dense kind of forest and there's not a whole lot of openings, one of the first modifications that I do to my cast is instead of coming all the way back to 12 o'clock with the rod pointing straight overhead, and then of course either hitting the branches or having the line go straight into those branches overhead, the first thing that I can do to prevent snags is do a shorter casting stroke. You know, and I'll talk a little bit about other techniques as well, but this is the main one that I use. Of course, if I'm going to a place that has a lot of trees, let's back up a little bit, talk about the equipment.

11:11On average, a tenkara rod is 12 feet long. My usual tenkara rod is 13 feet long, and I kind of stick with it. But if I'm fishing in a place with a lot of trees, I'm going to keep a line that is no more than the length of the rod. And that's kind of important when you're fishing places with a lot of snags, not having a super long line. Because as I said a second ago, it's easier to control the rod than it is to control a lot of line. So if there's a lot of trees around where you're going to be fishing, keep the line about the same length as the rod or even a foot or two shorter. And then your feet or your tippet will be extending about two feet beyond the rod possibly. But just don't use super long lines. Okay, now going back to my casting, how to modify my casting, what can you do here? So the typical cast is going to be overhead, you know, straight in front of me, keeping everything straight in front of me, stopping at 12 o'clock. If there are trees that are kind of shooting branches over my head, making like canopy of sorts, I'm going to modify my cast so that the casting stroke is shorter.

12:17Instead of coming all the way back to 12 o'clock, let's again assume that you're looking from my right side. You're looking at my profile, and, you know, so you can kind of picture that clock face. Instead of coming all the way to 12 o'clock, I'm going to move my rod and maybe stop it at 11 o'clock or so. or actually, sorry, got confused. If you're looking from my right shoulder, instead of coming to 12 o'clock, I'm going to stop the ride at 1 o'clock approximately. So stop it a little bit sooner with a little bit of an angle. That way the line is going to go a little bit more straight up as opposed to straight back a little bit. And you can even stop it a little bit sooner. So you can stop it like at 1.30, for example. As long as your line is short, you have a lot of room to kind of play with it. The second modification that I'm going to do is have a quicker cast. So shorter casting stroke, but also quicker cast, which is possible if you have a short line. So I'm going to go very short casting stroke and just kind of a little flick up and down, very quick.

13:20That's the first modification when there's a lot of trees and trees that are coming overhead. The next thing that I'm going to do, and by the way, I usually don't recommend choking the grip on the rod, like holding the rod higher up or making the rod shorter. In most situations, in some situations when there's a lot of canopy, then yes, you can choke up on your grip, maybe have one segment of the rod inside to make it shorter. But what happens is I usually prefer to have a longer rod relatively to the length of the line. And that combination allows me to control the line much more effectively, in my opinion. But you can, of course, have shorter rods, and it's good to have shorter lines in those cases. The second modification, or the second thing that I'm going to try to do is look for openings. You know, usually there's going to be some kind of opening where you can cast your line into. So let's say there's a couple of long branches right over my head, and they're kind of straight over my head.

14:22But hey, when I looked over my right shoulder, I saw that there's a nice opening, a few feet of opening in there. And instead of casting straight overhead, I can just cast my rod at a little bit of a diagonal kind of level casting to that opening. So that's another thing that you can do. And you can combine casting to that opening over your shoulder with a shorter casting stroke and a quicker casting stroke as well. and then the last one sometimes I don't do this very often to be honest but casting kind of like sidearm casting keeping the tip of the rod over the water the whole time you know that can be very useful if you're in a very dense kind of situation to avoid getting caught on trees behind you or above you now the next thing too is to be aware of and this happens a lot with when you're starting off casting, you know, what is causing some snags? Of course, the main cause of the snags is when we cast right into a branch, and sometimes we can't really avoid it because we're focused on the water. But what else can be causing snags on trees, especially behind us?

15:35So one thing that I, you know, I've started noticing, sometimes I take people out to places where there's not a whole lot of trees, not a lot of overhead kind of canopy, but there's some kind of shorter, medium-sized trees behind us. And in theory, and as you get more experience, you're probably never going to get caught on those trees behind you because they're kind of low-hanging, like maybe about the length of your rod or something. But what's happening, like there's two main causes that I've noticed. where people get caught on trees immediately behind them when the trees are not really tall. The first one is when people perform the back cast, and then they stop a little bit too long on the back cast. So if you come to 12 o'clock and, you know, your line is kind of shooting up, but if you stop for a second there, like, you know, like in fly fishing, if you're coming from a fly fishing background, you're taught to stop, let that kind of line roll behind you, and then you shoot it forward.

16:42With Tenkara, we're dealing with much less line, so we have to get rid of that kind of habit. And if you're completely new to fly fishing, period, just be aware that you're going to move. It's a very quick pause. It's going to be a very well-defined pause on the back cast, but it's going to be quick, so you're going to be up and down, up and down. but sometimes people come up, stop, down on the forward cast. And what happens is, you know, the line that you shot up above you, you know, and it should have been totally clear from the trees, when you stop for a second, the line's going to start falling. And then sometimes it's going to get caught on the trees behind you. And then you try to cast forward and it's snagged. So just be aware that your pause on the back cast should not be very long. The second reason that I see people getting caught on trees behind them is that they stop, sometimes they stop too long, but sometimes they move the rod too far back. So instead of stopping the rod pointing up and shooting the line up above, they kind of go with the rod too far back and then the line shoots behind them.

17:49So it's easy to prevent those kinds of snags on trees behind you. Just move the rod a little bit faster and don't move it quite as far back. Now, so that's kind of talking about preventing snags on trees behind you and above you. But let's talk about the other kind of two snags that we see very often. And those are usually going to be in front of you. There's going to be snags on trees on the other side of the stream. And then there's going to be snags in obstacles in the water. So when it comes to trees and branches on the other side of the stream, There's two kind of, you know, we have to be aware of what's out there for sure. And those are usually easier to be aware of because you're looking at them. But there's two main things, you know, just being aware of like also how long your reach is and that kind of thing. And also like obstacles in the water. Just be aware where the obstacles are. When we're fishing in mountain streams, there's going to be branches in front of us.

18:49and sometimes it might take a little while for us to kind of figure out how much or how far our reach is going to be but the main tip that I have is on your first couple of casts stop the rod tip high on the forecast so a lot of times we have a tendency to try to maximize our reach and we kind of stop the rod like you know almost parallel to the water kind of getting the maximum kind of reach we can then you get caught on trees in front of you but stop the rod tip high on the first couple of casts and then start lowering the tip of the route on your forward casts to kind of see how much distance you gain every time. So just kind of developing that awareness of your reach is important. And then also obstacles in the water. So we're talking about prevention here, and later on I'll talk about how to free it as soon as you see things happening. But obstacles in the water are really important. A lot of times, especially I'm picturing here in my mind, mountain streams. Mountain streams, you have these nice little defined kind of pools. Let's say that we're fishing a small pool that is eight feet long, right? Medium-sized kind of pool, not a super long run, but not a super short one. You catch your fly at the head of the pool where the kind of water's coming in, and you let the fly drift.

20:15And then below that eight-foot-long pool, there's another pool that looks kind of good, four feet long. So one of the things that I see very often is, you know, we see these two pools, and they're very well-defined. They're like very individual pools. And sometimes people want to fish both of them in one cast. And then in between them, like where the water kind of plunges, maybe they didn't realize there was a branch or a log or a rock or a couple of rocks kind of sticking up a little bit. And very often when I'm taking people out the first time, they will get caught in between the two pools. So to prevent snags, first of all, be aware, like, where can your fly get caught when it's traveling, either in one pool or from one pool to the other? So being aware of those obstacles in the water is really important. And sometimes we see a log, but, you know, maybe we think that our fly is going to go above it or something, and oftentimes it doesn't. Usually what I like to teach is fish the separate pools separately.

21:18You know, fish the four-foot pool below you and the eight-foot pool in front of you distinctly in different casts. So cast to one, and then you cast to the other, as opposed to letting it drift. and that's primarily to kind of avoid those obstacles that are most likely going to snag your fly. You know, whether it be a branch, whether it be a couple of rocks that are going to get your fly caught. You know, sometimes those are kind of easy to free, but sometimes I see a lot of people who are new to fly fishing getting caught on these kind of obstacles and just being aware of what's in the water. So one thing that you can do too is, you know, let's say you want to let it drift and go into the next pool. As it starts getting close to the obstacle in the water, just lift your rod and make sure that you know exactly where your fly is. And see if it's above the log or just a little bit to the side. You don't necessarily have to cast, but be aware.

22:20Just kind of manipulate your fly in a way that it's not going to get caught. Or my suggested, you know, method is as soon as you get close to that obstacle, just cast again to the pool or to the pool below you. So just being aware of that. Preventing snags, I think, in my opinion, is all about environmental awareness, like in terms of what is around you, awareness of your surroundings. Now, the next part that I wanted to talk about is the line getting caught on the rod itself. So, especially when people are starting off with tenkara, I see this really very often. You go to cast and the line or the fly hits the rod itself and gets caught and gets tangled. It's a big mess. raise your hand if you've seen that happen on your rod. I suspect a lot of you probably raise your hands right now. But there's very easy ways to prevent it. We just have to like learn what causes that. And there's also like a really easy way to, as soon as you see happening, not making it worse or kind of potentially freeing it right away. So let's talk about the line getting caught on the rod because that's something that causes a lot of frustration as well.

23:44So understanding what happens there, like what is causing your line to get caught on the rod itself. So in my observation, there's two things that are going to be causing the line to get caught on the rod. The first one is on your back cast, you know, where you're supposed to be throwing the line. It goes back to what I covered a minute ago. If you stop too long on your back cast, you're allowing the line to start falling behind you. and then when you go move your rod forward, the line's going to come and hit the rod and get caught. So if you're experiencing a lot of that problem, just on the back cast, instead of doing stop and let the fly drop and then go forward, just do a very quick stop. So let's say up, down, up, down. That's the kind of rhythm for a cast, up, down, as opposed to up, stop, down. That long pause allows the fly to kind of come down, get caught on the rod.

24:46The second reason that I've seen the lion getting caught on the rod pretty often is when people move the arm forward. So keep your arm relaxed, close to your body. You don't have to be tucking a book in under your arm or anything like that for your cast. But you're going to go up and down, just lifting your forearm and then breaking your wrist. sometimes when people are starting off I notice that they have this tendency to punch forward like move the arm forward extend the arm in front of them when they go perform the forward cast so rather than keeping the arm close to their body the whole time they keep the arm close to the body when they go back and then when they go forward they extend the arm in front of them they extend the arm completely and that's going to get make the line more likely to get caught on the rod itself. Very easy to prevent it. Just keep your arm close to your body when you do the back cast as well as when you do the forward cast. Now here's the little tip that's probably going to make this podcast most valuable to a lot of you today.

25:54When, and this is something that I just learned a few months ago, and I am including that in my book on Tenkara that I've been working on. It's a new chapter that I had to go back and start working on because it's something that I've noticed helps a lot of people. If you notice that your line got caught on the rod itself, a lot of times people have two tendencies. They're either going to point the tip down into the stream or they're going to shake the rod. And those are two horrible ways to deal with the situation because it makes the line get more and more tangled. Here's the tip of the day. Drum rows here. I cannot do drum rows. But when you see the line getting caught on the rod itself, all you have to do is lift the tip of the rod up. Point the rod up above your head. in my experience of observing people recently and with my own self I would say 8 possibly even 9 out of 10 times when you point your rod up the line is going to slide right back to your hand and you're going to be able to completely get it free without any frustration so as soon as you see the line hitting the rod do not point it down, do not shake the rod calmly lift the rod up, point the rod up above your head and most often the line is going to come straight down to you.

27:28If it does not, and again in my experience 8 out of 10 times at least it will, but if it doesn't collapse the rod in kind of a slow way because if you try to do kind of fast, it makes the line kind of go around it's almost like shaking the rod, but collapse the rod kind of slowly and then work with that little tangle that you got on the tip of the rod really close to you. Just avoid having the rod extended and go work on the tip because that could cause all kinds of problems as well. So that was the tip of the day, I think, that some of you are really going to appreciate. Pointing the rod up will eliminate a lot of problems if you get caught on your rod itself. But now let's talk about, you know, if you are not able to prevent snags either on the route itself or on the trees around you or in front of you on obstacles. What do we do? How do we free our fly most easily? And that's something that I realized I'm actually really good at because I will get caught.

28:31I mean, sometimes I'm just focused on the water in front of me and I forget to look at what's around me. You know, sometimes I'm distracted and I'll make my back cast a little bit too slow. luckily it doesn't happen quite that often anymore but sometimes I have to deal with freeing the fly from obstacles either for myself or for people that I'm with and I had somebody recently commenting like oh how'd you do that you know because it actually happens very often when I go out with people and they get caught and they're like having a hard time freeing their fly and I get the rod and in a second I get it free so how do we go about doing that so first of all we have to calmly, like as soon as you get caught, we have to understand where you got caught and how you got caught, I think, in my opinion. That's going to be important, that kind of awareness. Did it get caught on trees? Did it get caught on obstacles in front of you? What kind of tree is it?

29:32Is it a very thin branch or thick branch? Because everything is going to be just a little bit different. But let's first talk about, so I already talked about freeing the snag from the rod when it gets caught on the rod itself. So I'm going to focus on trees as well as obstacles in the water. First of all, let's talk about trees above us or behind us. If the tree, if the line gets caught, Like let's say you do your back cast and he gets caught on the back cast. The first thing to do is understand what kind of tree and what thickness of branch did it get caught on. Because I've noticed a couple of things. In my opinion or in my experience so far, there's different ways to free flies from different snags. If it's an evergreen kind of tree, a tree that is always green, like a pine tree, you're not going to like this, but in my experience, a lot of times that's going to be a lost fly.

30:40I don't give up super easily, but knowing that it's an evergreen, a pine kind of tree, in my experience, makes it a little bit harder to free the fly, as opposed to a deciduous kind of tree, like an oak or willows and that kind of trees. Because I think the branch, like the flexibility of the branches and that kind of thing makes a difference. So let's say you do your back cast on a deciduous kind of tree, like with thinner, kind of wispier kind of branches. If I get caught on a wispy branch, actually, let's backtrack a little bit. Before I talk about the types of trees that you get caught on, the main technique when you get caught on your back cast is to do a super quick but very little power kind of flick. So you get caught. Sometimes we have a tendency to jerk a rod, like just kind of put this power on it, but kind of go slowly, making the rod arch.

31:41and all you're doing when you're doing that is you're making the fly kind of get caught, you know, more stuck on the branch depending how you get caught up there. So the main thing here for any back cast snags is to do a back cast or like, you know, above you and that kind of thing is to do a really quick flick away from where you got caught. So it's a very quick kind of like a wrist kind of flick to get it free. Now let's go back to what I started talking about, the evergreens and the deciduous, because there's a little bit of a difference, I think. With the deciduous trees, a lot of times they'll have kind of wispier, thinner branches. And the snapping technique is really, really good. and oftentimes just this really kind of quick flick away from where it got caught is going to free it. Whereas in the evergreens, like the pine trees, in my experience, a lot of times I'll still do the kind of quick flick, but sometimes it doesn't get free quite as easily.

32:48I don't give up quite that easily. The rods are actually fairly strong as long as you're not doing this forceful kind of long pull, as long as you're doing kind of a quick flick. The rods can take you fairly well. The main thing to avoid is just kind of like this big, long, forceful pull. Just a quick flick to try to get the line tightened and free the fly. With the deciduous trees, I was going to say like I probably, I would say about 70, 80% of the time I'll get my fly back just by doing this quick flick. I'd say 70%. With the evergreens, the quick flick, maybe 40% of the time, I'll get my fly back by doing that. If that doesn't work, the next thing that I'm going to do is collapse my rod entirely, put my thumb on the rod to keep the rod tip inside the main segment, and then I'm going to be holding the line at this point. And at this point, I don't know if any of you kind of flew kites as kids, but you have this kind of jerky motion with your line.

33:53Sometimes when you're flying a kite, make it kind of do all kinds of motion. So I get the line and I just do kind of almost the same thing, just kind of a quick little flicks. And, you know, that might allow me to get my fly back without potentially breaking the rod. So usually with the quick flicks with the rod extended, I'll do it like three or four times, and then I'll collapse the rod, pull the line, and kind of jerk on the line a little bit, trying to get it free. with the evergreens you know maybe I'll get another 10% of the time I'll get my fly back but very often I just kind of give up a little bit more quickly when it's on a pine tree and I'll just pull the line straight and break off the tippet I will lose a fly unfortunately it happens with a deciduous kind of tree like you know willows and oaks and just thinner branches just doing this kind of really quick motion will get it free fairly quickly maybe 30-40% of the time.

34:54So just so that you know that if you get caught on an evergreen kind of tree, you'll lose your fly more likely than not. So it doesn't help you that much, but the techniques here, quick snaps and then pulling on the line. Now let's talk about trees in front of you. So this is one that I like. It's a little bit hard to execute, but it's something very useful for you to know. Sometimes when you cast forward, let's say you have a bunch of branches in front of you and there's this really good-looking spot, but it's kind of tight. You have to get a casting exactly in this tiny little spot. But unfortunately, your fly goes over this branch that you were trying to avoid. It will happen. This technique, it kind of takes a little bit of a calm nerve to not make things worse. So when you cast forward and your fly hits that branch that you're trying to avoid, the way to prevent getting actually caught on the rod is to stop.

35:57So you cast forward, the fly goes there. A lot of times novices will have, not even novices, I shouldn't say that, pretty much anybody has a tendency to, as soon as they see the fly hitting the branch, they immediately want to pull the rod back. And in that case, the hook is going to do what it's designed to do. When you pull it back, it's going to hook something. That's how you hook a fish. Now, how do we avoid that? It's a little bit the same as preventing a small little fish from taking your fly or from really getting hooked when you're targeting a big fish, and I'll talk about that some other day. But as soon as you cast forward and you see that the fly went right into the branch, stop the rod tip right where you stopped it on the forward cast. Do not pull back. Just avoid the temptation to pull it back, thinking that you're going to get it free, because most likely you're not. So another really kind of good tip here for today is if you have the calm nerve to stop your rod tip on a forward cast in that one position, then your fly is just going to dangle there for a second, and then you can slowly kind of pull it back.

37:08But you want to make your fly stop and just kind of dangle there, and then pull the rod slowly back towards you. And very often, you're just going to come right out. I've noticed that probably 80% of the time, when I'm getting caught on branches in front of me or potentially getting caught, I actually avoid a snag just by stopping the rod right there and then calmly pulling back. It's hard to execute just because it kind of takes, you overriding your intuition to pull the fly right back. So you have to stop and then let it kind of do its thing and then pull it back to you. Besides trees in front of you, let's talk about obstacles in the water because there's a few different things that we can do here. But the main thing is to understand how your fly got caught in a particular spot. So let's say you're fishing. Let's go back to that example. We have an 8-foot pole in front of me in a four-foot-long pool downstream from me, and I get caught somewhere in between.

38:14The first thing is understanding the direction that the fly was traveling when it got caught. So it's pretty simple, really, but sometimes not the most intuitive thing. Actually, let's say that we're fishing a pool above, like upstream from us, and the fly is kind of traveling and then it gets caught somewhere. So let's ignore that example of the 8-foot pool and the 4-foot pool. But we cast upstream, the fly comes down, gets caught, either in a rock or in a log. Sometimes we might have a tendency to pull it back towards ourselves. But understand that the fly got caught because it was traveling downstream and you got in this angle where maybe you got stuck between two rocks or you got stuck on a log or something, if you pull it towards yourself, you're making things worse. So in that case, you just have to understand that the fly got caught by coming downstream. You want to pull the fly upstream from the obstacle.

39:16So that's number one. Understanding that you want to just pull it into the direction you're traveling from. So if the fly is coming downstream and it gets caught, pull it upstream from the obstacle. And that's probably almost every situation when it gets caught. It's going to be as simple as that, just pulling it upstream from the obstacles. Now, there's other things that you can do as well. So let's say you're fishing something, you know, like mostly like across from you, and you're trying to pull it into the direction you're traveling from, but it's not doing anything. Here's a little trick that I picked up recently to try to free you from stuff in the water. When it gets caught on a rock and you cannot seem to usually just pull it out, try shaking the rod very, very rapidly. Just shake it, shake it, shake it. Keep the line tight and shake it very rapidly.

40:16and sometimes they'll free the fly from the obstacle as well. And then the third thing, sometimes like let's say you're upstream from the obstacle or maybe you're pulling the fly up towards you and you got caught. The third method that you can try is just relax the line into the water, let the current take it downstream from the obstacle and then sometimes that letting the kind of line being pulled will kind of free it. So those are kind of the three kind of main things to do when the fly gets caught in an obstacle in the water. Sometimes you'll not be able to retrieve it by doing any of those things, but you do have a good chance to get it back by trying those. If you're not able to free your fly just using the rod in those cases, then you have to collapse the rod, kind of like what we did with the tree above us. Collapse the rod entirely, put the tip of the rod inside, put a thumb in there, and then pull on the line directly.

41:21I like to do a couple of more jerks on the line to see if you'll free it, but sometimes just pulling straight out to break the tippet, which is why we recommend using 4X tippet or less on our rods, about six pounds or so or less, so that you can break it by using your hands. well I think I covered most of it I mean it's one of those things it's a little tricky to cover in audio you know without showing I don't have a video of this right now might try to work on some photographs because we have to do that for our book that's coming out next year anyways but yeah if you have other tips on how to get the fly back and how to prevent snags, how to prevent getting caught on things, and how to free from snags. Definitely share it with us on tenkarausa.com forward slash Facebook. But hopefully this will be useful for you to kind of get less frustrating time in the water, getting fewer snags, preventing snags to begin with, and then how to free it when it does happen, because it will happen. I hope that helped. I hope that was a useful episode. If you found that it was useful, let us know. Share an email with us or leave a comment on our page, leave a review on iTunes and that kind of thing. I'd like to extend a special thank you to Nick Ogawa, also known as Takenobu. Check out his music at takenobumusic.com. We'll be posting links to any references we made in this podcast, such as Takenobu's music, on our website, www.tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast.

43:07And until next time on the Tenkara Cast.