I am treading on very controversial ground here, and this is a subject that many professional charter boat captains feel very strongly about, including myself.

For many years, I always fished double hooks in my marlin lures, in the assumed belief that the more hooks you put in a lure, the better the chances of one of them hooking the fish. (Not always the case).

It was really only as a result of one of my deckies getting a huge 12/0 marlin hook right through his hand while dealing with a fish at boatside, that we decided to take a closer look at the pros and cons of double hooks, in light of the obvious danger people expose themselves to while trying to release large and very angry fish at the boat.

Poor Hemedi was unable to use that hand for some time after this and in those days I didn’t carry a large pair of bolt cutters on board, like I do now, so he had to suffer until we could get him home in order to clamp part of the protruding hook in a vice and saw the thing off with a hacksaw, so that it could be pulled out. If you’ve ever tried to saw through a big marlin  hook, you’ll know that it is no easy task, and the vibrations only added to the agony.

My son, Simon and I decided to keep a log of every fish we caught, for a whole season before making any snap decision, and the results of this study were interesting. I’m afraid I have long since lost the actual log, but it showed that by far the greatest number of fish were hooked on the tail hook only. A few were hooked on both hooks, while only a very occasional fish was on only the front hook.

In light of this, we decided to remove the front hooks altogether, fishing only a single hook far back in the tail of the lure, positioned so that only the point and the barb were just inside the skirt.

Not only has this made it a whole lot safer for whoever has to remove the hook from the fishes’ mouth, but we noticed immediately that the lures ran much better, attracting more strikes, and our catch rate improved. One often found with the double hook rigs, that the skirt could become bunched on that front hook causing the lure to spin or run badly, something we no longer need to bother about now.

The double rigs are designed to hook fish in both the upper and lower jaws simultaneously. I dont think I could live with my conscience at the thought of one of these beautiful creatures breaking free with both hooks in her only to die a miserable death of starvation through being unable to open her mouth to feed.

If you do go to single hooks, it is necessary to use the type of hook that has an inward facing point, such as the Mustad Southern and Tuna hook. These penetgrate much better than the normal parallel point that is parallel to the shank. I use stainless hooks that do not stain the lure skirts with rust, but these are more brittle than high tensile steel and can snap wiring a really big fish, so maybe use one size bigger for those ’special’ lures.

The only time I use double rigs are on small sailfish strips using the little salmon hooks, which are the preferred sailfish hook. If someone is unlucky enough to get one in his hand, these are easily cut with bolt cutters, and being stainless steel, are normally clean and free of rust. So far I havent had this problem !