Practice until your fingers remember it
In the last lesson we worked slowly through the clinch knot, step by step, and if you were with me you likely felt reasonably confident in the classroom. There is a distinction to draw, however. Knowing the steps and having your fingers execute them without conscious thought are two entirely separate skills. This lesson concerns the second.
People assume that once they have tied a knot correctly a single time, they have acquired it. You have not acquired it. Not yet. You have it the way you "know" a phone number after seeing it once, which is to say not at all the moment someone actually asks you to produce it.
Why this matters more than it appears to
You will be tying this knot on the riverbank, probably with cold hands, probably because you have just lost a fly in a branch or a fish has bitten through your tippet, and you will want to be fishing again in roughly ninety seconds, not five minutes. If your fingers already know the sequence, you scarcely think about it. If they do not, you stand in the wind squinting at monofilament while the fish continue doing whatever fish do in your absence.
And I will restate the position, because I hold to it: the knot matters more than the cast. A superb cast with a poor knot merely earns you the sight of your fly and your fish departing together. No one applauds a beautiful cast that terminates in a snapped line.
The practice, at home, this week
You do not need a river for this. You do not even need a rod. You do need the following:
- A spool of the tippet material we distributed, or any monofilament line; it need not be expensive
- A hook with the barb pinched down (always, no argument from me on that one), or a safety pin or bent paperclip, which serve perfectly well for pure repetition
- Fifteen minutes, somewhere with adequate light
Sit at the kitchen table. Tie the clinch knot. Cut it off. Tie it again. Do this while half your attention is elsewhere, on a show or a podcast, because that is in fact the objective. You want to reach the point where your hands can perform it while your mind is entirely elsewhere. That is what "fingers remember it" means. It is not a figure of speech; it is the actual skill.
Some evenings do ten in a row. Some evenings do three and call it settled. The count does not matter, provided you are doing it more than once a week between now and our return to the water.
This is where I have to mention Shaylee
My daughter, about twenty at the time, came out to the garage one evening because she said she wanted to learn to fish. What actually occurred is that she spent the entire evening tangling line and then, very patiently and very slowly, untangling it again. She never touched a rod. Never made it outside. She simply sat there working knots and snarls loose with her fingers for hours.
Afterward she told me it was the calmest she had felt all semester.
I said nothing perceptive in the moment; I simply said that is great, honey. But I considered it a great deal afterward, because that is when it registered that this class, and this hobby generally, is not solely about catching fish. Some of it is your hands performing a small, repetitive, useful task while your mind takes a break. Knot practice can function the same way, if you permit it. You need not treat it as homework you are dreading. Put on something you enjoy watching and tie knots with half your attention. It counts as practice either way.
A couple of honest notes
Your tippet will behave somewhat differently at this elevation and in our dry air than material described online; it dries out and grows more brittle sitting in a hot car or a sun-exposed tackle box, so do not practice with year-old line found in a drawer and then wonder why it keeps snapping. Use fresh material for practice and reserve your good spool for the water.
And continue pinching those barbs down, even on your practice hook. I hooked my own ear once on a genuine barbed hook and had to account for it at church the next morning, so I now keep nothing sharp near my hands or anyone else's without first flattening the barb. An old habit, and a good one.
Before next time
Tie the clinch knot at least twenty times total before we meet again; it need not be all at once. When your fingers begin moving before your brain catches up, you will know you are getting there.