Guarding against the weeds!
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Uni Products Fly Tiers Corner
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July 2025
By Craig Riendeau
No fishing jargon is truer than to catch fish, you must fish where they live. When bass fishing this often means in weeds, under docks, in brush piles and blowdowns. You know, places where most fly casters are reluctant to throw their precious works of art into fearing losing them. This, even though they know the tighter into the cover they cast the more their odds of catching a big one go up.
The fear of hanging up is always there when fishing around cover. For this very reason I tend to tie most of my fly patterns on either 60- or 90-degree hooks. These will ride hook point up and will hang up less because of this. But this is not perfect. On rocky bottom situations, an upturned hook will come through most of the time. With weeds, they’ll come through thin weeds and can be ripped out if they do get hung up, but in heavy weeds and especially wood, no bare hook is making it out without hanging up.
This is where weed guards come in handy. I know many fly fishers abhor the use of weed guards, often calling them fish guards. Nothing can be farther from the truth. A proper-sized and placed guard will easily add to your fish total and not detract from it.
I’ve come to really like one particular type of guard for its ease of installation and its effectiveness. This is a double nylon coated stainless steel wire guard. As long as your fly pattern is tied on either a 60- or 90-degree hook, you can add (or remove) this weed guard to the fly at any time. This is because the guard is only attached to the hook eye stem and doesn’t have to connect to the hook shank at all. Because of this, when you begin tying you are not forced to decide if you’re adding a weed guard or not.
The product that I use for this is AFW Surflon 1×7 nylon-coated stainless steel leader wire. It comes in spools from 30 feet to 1000 feet, if you think you’re going to tie a lot of flies. You can get it in strengths from 10-pound test to 250 pounds. Most of my bass flies’ range in size from No. 2 to No. 2/0. For these sizes of hooks, I like to use 45-pound-test wire. If you’re going smaller in hook size, maybe drop down to a 30-pound-test wire and move up to a 60- pound-wire if you go bigger.
This is an easy tie to add the weed guard to your fly. Put your fly in your vise, Cut a pair of two-inch lengths of wire from the spool. Attach your thread (I like clear .006 Mono thread) to the hook eye stem. Secure one piece of wire onto each side of the stem making sure the wire does not extend past the hook shank. This would leave a sharp edge of wire that could cut your tippet.
Press down on the wire near the eye stem bending it over towards the hook point. Using wire cutters, trim the wire so that it extends just past the hook barb. To both of these cut edges, add a drop of UV glue and harden them with the blue light. This is again to alleviate the sharp edge of the wire.
Now simply adjust the wires position over the hook to where it will do you the most good. I feel that the wire should be about 3/8 of an inch above and to either side of the hook point to offer optimum protection from straight on contact and from contact when rolling sideways over a branch. Just remember to pull a fly slow and steady over any wood cover. A fast jerk will only set the hook into the timber.
Little if any extra pressure is required when setting the hook with this guard. The fish will do most of the work for you. When they clamp down on the fly, they will collapse the weed guard themselves making for a positive hook up.
Tie a few up and gather the courage to toss that fly right in the cover. It may come back with a hefty surprise.
