Understanding fly-fishing hooks
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UNI Products Fly Tiers Corner
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February 2026
Article and photo by Craig Riendeau
I recently received a new catalog from a fly-tying supply company. There was a mind boggling 27 pages of just hooks. Even then, most of the hooks I personally use to tie my bass bugs weren’t even on the list and there were no saltwater hooks at all. So, in reality, there are probably another 27 pages of hooks out there.
Hook catalogs can contain mind-boggling numbers of hook styles.
If I was new to tying, or even fairly accomplished and looking to design my own pattern, how would I begin to figure out which hook to use? What’s with all these classifications like short, heavy or wide? I guess my age is showing with the title to this article when I say, “you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”
In a word the truthful answer is “depends.” You need to look at the requirements of what you want the fly to do to determine which hook is best. Dry flies, streamers, nymphs, poppers, all have different requirements to making them behave the way you envision them at the vise. And not all hooks are created equal.
The main differences between hooks are hook size, length, wire size, gap and eye position. To make this even more fun is that there is no “standard” that runs from hook brand to hook brand. Each manufacturer sets their own norm, but at least after that, all the terms governing increasing or decreasing dimensions are mostly constant.
Let’s start with hook sizes. There are the smaller hook sizes that go from No. 32 up to No. 1. Oddly the larger the number, the smaller the hook. Then there’s the large hooks that go by aught size, which go from 1/0 to somewhere about 20/0; really big. Here the larger the number, the larger the hook.
Now to find the hook you want, you need to determine what the manufacture bases hook size from; what is its standard. In a catalog, find one marked “standard length/standard wire,” no matter the hook size. All the size changes follow the same formula after that.
There’s length. Starting from standard there will be 1x long, 2x long, or conversely 1x short or 2x short and so on. What this means is starting from “standard” size, which can vary slightly manufacturer to manufacturer, on a 1x hook, the shank length is going to be one hook size longer. While the hook gap size stayed the same, the length of the shank is now as long as a hook one gap size bigger. The No. 8 gap hook now has No. 6 hook length. This works the same the opposite way for short.
Next is wire size, the thickness of the hook shanks. Standard wire is typically called a dry fly hook. Again, after that they go 1x or 2x fine for a thinner wire hook, which is typically used to be able to bend the wire and free the hook if you hang up, rather than lose the fly. On the other side there is 1x, 2x, or even 3x heavy for very stout wire hooks for use on very strong fish or just to add weight to help sink the fly without increasing size or adding lead. The X increase or decrease for that matter, doesn’t mean the shank wire got a full one or two times thicker than the standard, but rather it is some degree heavier or lighter. This thickness increase per X size varies from hook brand to hook brand. There is no standard as there is with length. It is something like a 10-percent thickness increase per X size. You’ll have to experiment with this to determine which wire thickness fits your needs.
Finally, we got hook eye position. There’s upturned, downturned, straight and varying angles of jig hooks. Upturned is that the hook eye is bent upwards away from the point to about a 45-degree angle. Typically, this is so that the pull of the line on the hook keeps the fly rising upward to facilitate swinging a salmon fly on the surface. Conversely a downturned eye where the hook eye is bent towards the hook point, tends to keep the head of the fly down. With a dry fly this will anchor the hackle to the surface film for a better float.
A straight eye hook is great for streamers or fly patterns that you want to move horizontally. When the eye is directly in line with the shank, pulling on it accentuates the forward, straight line motion.
A jig hook is pretty much self-explanatory. When you want a subsurface pattern to have an up and down jigging motion, this is your hook. There’re varying degrees of eye angles here too. It can be 90-degree, 60-degree or 45-degree of bend to the hook eye. In a nutshell, the steeper the angle, the more up and down motion to the fly, while the lesser angle has a little more swimming action and less up and down. All of these though keep the hook point facing upwards making them more snag resistant than all other hooks.
This is just a quick “splainin” of the differences in hooks. So next time you tie, take the time to think of what you need in a fly. Do you need a longer hook but not increase the gap? Or maybe you need a shorter hook but with more weight. Whatever it is, believe me, it’s out there, 27 pages out there.
