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With its rounded shape, inward-pointing and right-angled tip, the circle hook is a real eye-catcher. Beyond their astonishment at this anatomical oddity, many anglers wonder how this hook with such a singular shape can manage to bite fish. And yet...
If used correctly, the circle hook offers two main advantages:
- It is self-fastening.
- It allows you to always bite the fish in the corner of the mouth.
A wide, rounded shape
The shape of the circle hook, as its name suggests, is very wide and rounded, to allow the hook to slide easily into the fish's mouth to finish, thanks to its wide opening at the corner of the mouth.
It's important to understand that this type of hook is designed for fish that grab a bait and swim away with it... As the fish swims away, you can easily imagine the line running along the fish's body and the hook encircling the corner of the mouth like a hook.
A re-entrant tip
Once the hook is at the corner of the mouth, the right-angled re-entrant point is designed to bite into hard flesh and penetrate it when the line is tensioned, the head is struck or the fish changes direction.
Imagine that when the line is perpendicular to the axis of the fish, the hook will have rotated around the corner of the mouth and the point will have penetrated the flesh.
To fully understand the benefits and mechanism of the circle hook, it's very important to visualize this escape and line tensioning phase.
No shoeing required
By design, the circle hook is self-fastening. Simply tensioning the line, inducing a reaction from the fish, will allow the hook to penetrate. Setting the hook can even be counter-productive.
Another advantage of this hook is that its special shape considerably reduces unhooking.
An ethical hook
A fish bitten at the corner of the mouth is a fish that is not damaged and retains all its chances of survival. In the spirit of catch and release, and if your practices offer you the opportunity to use circle hooks, I particularly invite you to try them out.
Attention to assembly
To be fully effective, and to ensure that the hook rotates perfectly when self-tied, it's important to mount the circle hook with the wire exiting at the front of the eye or paddle. In this way, the pressure of the wire on the eye will cause the hook to turn in the right direction. Although this may seem an unnatural presentation, it is the most effective.
