Tube flies offer five major advantages to steelheaders.

1) A long-shank hook often acts as a lever in a fish's mouth and can twist out. Tubes enable the use of short-shank hooks with large fly patterns, which eliminates the lever effect of long-shank hooks and increases the hooked-to-landed ratio. Waller says that when he used conventional long-shanked hooks he normally landed from 60 to 70 percent of his steelhead. But now with short-shank hooks on tube flies he lands at least 80 percent. He notes that when you have the fish of a lifetime on, that difference can become critical. Waller recalls losing a 20-plus-pound steelhead on a standard, extra-long-shank hook as the defining moment when he decided to convert completely to tubes.

2) You can use the sharpest hooks available to the fishing market on conventional patterns. Gamakatsu and Owner hooks are designed for bait fishing and for fish that often strike short or nip at the fly. Steelheaders know that steelhead often nip at the fly when they chase it, especially in colder water temperatures. Waller reports that he now has little faith in the conventional steelhead and salmon hooks offered by most manufacturers. "They may look elegant, but in my experience they don't re-sharpen very well and don't penetrate as well as Owner or Gamakatsu bait hooks. A sharp tip on the point is little help if the taper of the entire point is not thin enough."

3) The tube fly construction allows you to change a hook when it dulls without discarding the fly. Many steelhead and traditional Atlantic salmon patterns take a long time to tie and they dull easily—especially wets fished deep among rocks in winter steelheading.

4) You can also use small hooks to reduce hook damage to wild steelhead, and you can adjust the location of the hook in the fly depending on the aggressiveness of the fish.

When a fish takes a tube fly, the tube often slides away from the hook (above) reducing wear and tear on the fly and making it easy to remove the hook. Crimp the barbs on all hooks before fishign them. Jay Nichols photo

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5) Large bulky flies cast easier without the weight of a large hook. Though many advanced steelheaders design flies with weight to help their anchor for certain Spey casts, for most anglers, large flies tied on tubes allow them to cast large, heavily dressed flies with relative ease.

Through trial and error Waller used and altered the tube system that Clay taught him. He says that other steelheaders in the Northwest have been experimenting with tubes, and his system merely consists of refinements of his and his fishing partners' best ideas developed over the years.

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Jay Nichols was the managing editor of Fly Fisherman when he wrote this article for the Feb. 2005 issue. He lives in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania.

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