“Fishing the hang” is a simple trick for getting following fish to hit your fly. Here’s how to do it

We’ve all experienced it, the tap, swirl or flash of colour made by a fish trying to eat your fly—at the exact moment you pull it away for your next cast. This kind of agonizing near-miss is especially common when fishing a sinking line in still water. At the end of a long retrieve with no strikes, you’re understandably eager to make a fresh cast, but then end up kicking yourself for doing it a split-second too soon.

For 20 years, I thought this was just an inevitable, exasperating part of fly fishing. It’s not. There’s an astonishingly simple and effective technique called “fishing the hang” for hooking those last-moment biters. Here’s why it works, and how to do it.

WHY IT WORKS

To understand fishing the hang, it’s helpful to think about how a sinking fly line—and thus your fly—behaves. When a sinking line hits the water, the whole length descends at the same rate, sweeping the fly and leader down with it. As you strip in line, the fly’s path is roughly horizontally until it’s almost back to you and rises steeply toward your rod tip. (The same thing happens with a weighted fly and a floating line, but since the fly doesn’t go very deep, the final rise is less dramatic.)

From underwater camera footage, we know that trout in lakes and ponds often follow baits for a long time without striking. Bass, pike, walleye and other fly-rod gamefish do the same thing. However, these followers are sometimes triggered to bite if the bait changes speed and direction, like a baitfish or insect moving toward the surface.

So, picture how a subsurface fly on a sinking line moves at a relatively consistent depth until near the end of the retrieve, when it scoots up toward your rod tip. That triggers the fish to attack, just as you’re flicking the line up and away. So instead of hitting steel, the fish strikes the spot where your fly was an instant earlier, leaving both parties frustrated and bereft (if for different reasons).