Tube poppers hook mounting

A topic that crops up constantly within pike fly-fishing forums is the amount of missed hook ups pike fly-fishermen get when using poppers and how can they improve their chances. Many frustrated pike fly fishermen ask the question whether its their technique that is loosing them fish. Sure, every now and then one is going to be caught with his pants down and a lost fish can be blamed on lack of concentration, but 90% of the time It can be put down to two distinct reasons.

The 1^st being when stripping a popper back across the surface most takes occur as the popper comes to stand still as you gather more line to strip again. A pike’s instinct will be to attack during this lull in movement. Most times you are unaware that your popper will be hit and so you strip more line off, which often catches a pike slightly of the trajectory it was moving in and so when it breaches the surface most times the popper has just fractionally moved out from the range of its gaping mouth, thus resulting in the pike missing the popper altogether.

The second reasoning and this is a problem I’ve noticed with all poppers and that is the popper head generally is too big for the hook. The gape between the hook point and the shaft is reduced which in turn will hamper the setting of the hook in the pikes mouth.

This problem is solved though when tying your poppers on to tubes. You can see here with this example how much surface area you gain by having the hook placed further back from the popper head. You can still tie the same amount of material on to the tube as what you would have tied on to your hook for hardly any extra weight. One will see a considerable improvement in the amount of fish you catch when tying your poppers in this manner.