Pegging beads...more controversial than pineapple on pizza???

[Gregg]

Haven’t posted here for a while, been fishing a ton. Had a somewhat humorous interaction a few months back and been on my mind. Went into Kiene’s to pick up some 8mm beads and pegs, selection was pretty darn slim and when I asked where the pegs / beads were one of the employees responded with “I don’t know, I would never peg a bead. Maybe somewhere over there...”. I wasn’t even bent about the customer service thing, I didn’t take it for that big of a deal, I was just more curious about why some people get all uppity about pegging beads and what the actual experience is with it. My experience has been that trout tend to take eggs deeper for some strange reason, I’m not a trout scientist so I have no idea if that’s a thing, but when I fish an egg pattern more often than not I’m reaching way down their gullett with my pliers to get the damn thing out, which I imagine is stressing that fish + increased time being out of the water. When I fish a pegged bead the hook isn’t almost ALWAYS in the jaw, typically on the outside, and I can unhook and release the fish while it’s entirely in the water without ever touching it. Quick and easy.

I expect the con perspective to be something about “ur flossing der fish!!!” but come on...there’s a 1” gap between the hook and the bead, we aren’t talking about dragging 20 yards of mono with a treble hook across the river here. There’s longer gaps on stinger hooks on streamers. Most guides I know roll their eyes at the criticism and peg beads all day, curious what everyone’s angle is and if I’m missing a valid argument against it. Is it just too damn effective? Is it more ethical to turn that plastic into fibers and tie it onto the shank instead of melting that same plastic and floating it above the hook?

And most importantly, have you even had pineapple on pizza??? It’s great. People are crazy if they think otherwise.

[Larry S]

Gregg,
Check your PM's.
Best,
Larry S
Sun Diego

[Ralph]

"Most guides I know roll their eyes at the criticism and peg beads all day". It would be more accurate to say, "Most guides I know roll their eyes at Fish and Wildlife regulations and peg beads all day." I would add that most anglers state their 8" fish is about a foot and their 4" gap between bead and hook is about 1". Rationalize until the cows come home, but under any pretext, it is still snagging.

[Sheepdog8404]

I imagine guides do what guides do because at the end of the day, a client who puts fish in the net is a client willing to give a generous tip regardless if regulations and ethics are considered. Maybe a pegged bead is more effective for "catching" fish but why sacrifice morality and honest catching for numbers? Just seems unethical to me. If numbers are what you want to chase and beads are how you want to fish, why not put the FLY rod down and pick up a conventional or spinning system?

[Gregg]

“...why sacrifice mortality and honest catching for numbers”

This is the conversation I want to have. Are you saying, through experientation and evidence, that a pegged bead IS a more harmful to a fish than a glo-bug or other egg pattern? What I’m saying is in my experience using both and watching guides use both, I’ve seen overwhelmingly that glo-bug / egg patterns end up deeper in the fish and are more harmful to remove. I believe in outliers and flukes so maybe dozens of days of seeing the same thing is a weird statistical anomaly? Weirder things in this world have happened. If you’ve fished both have you seen the opposite? Ralph loves making assumptions, I imagine it’s from getting old and salty but also from some experience and truth of what he’s seen in his many years being a river Jedi master, but if a pegged bead is rigged 1” above the hook as I’ve seen everyone do, is this actually more harmful? Is it “unethical”? Is a San Juan worm “unethical”? Why fish a streamer when you could just toss a rapala from a spinning rod? Or are we just being a bunch of cork sniffers and parsing unimportant details so we have something to turn our noses up at? And if it is harmful and unethical, why are these products even offered at fly shops and why isn’t anyone picketing to have them taken off the shelves? I’m 100% positive Ralph will be able to link to a 38 page report from 1992 on trout mortality with pegged beads, and I hope he does. I would actually like to read it.

[Ffdoc]

Somewhere there is a guy wearing a tweed jacket, smoking a pipe and sitting on a bench waiting to cast only to a rising trout. He is using a bamboo rod and casting only dry flies made of natural fur and feathers. My hat is off to him and he can call himself a true purist. For the rest of us we look very silly when we turn our noses up and call fellow fly fishers lesser sportsmen because they use bead head nymphs or weighted flies or artificial material for flies or split shot with flies or pegged beads or don't swing for steelhead. If you follow the law, go barbless and release your wild fish unharmed and carefully, I cannot look down on you however you choose to fish and you are my brother or sister. These discussions come up from time to time and always seem to bring out the worst in some.


My perspective.

Mike

FFdoc

[Sheepdog8404]

“...why sacrifice mortality and honest catching for numbers”

This is the conversation I want to have.

Which question would you like me to answer first?

In my experience and in the many reports, articles and journals I've read regarding fishing with egg imitations in general, whether they be a glo bug, pegged bead, pautzke eggs and roe sacs, trout tend to get hooked much deeper and require more attention to get unhooked as you stated. Not sure why this is the case but I'm sure there's a scholarly journal out there which explains in detail the physics and fish behavior that leads to this. It didn't take me very long to get away from this style of fishing after releasing a handful of fish only to watch them go belly up or swim off sloooowly and leaving me with a disgusted sensation that I squandered the experience of catching that fish only to know his fate was probably sealed due to the rig I was using. You said in your OP that you notice fish take beads deeper and the process to unhook them stresses the fish. So I ask you, why continue to do that if you know how it turns out? If you fish pegged beads and notice they're hooked on the outside of the mouth, isn't that an unfair catch? A fish with a hook not IN the mouth is a snagged fish, is it not? If I land a fish that I saw strike at the fly but the fly is lodged in it's head, fin, cheek, eye, throat or anywhere else on it's head EXCEPT IN THE MOUTH, I don't count that fish. I didn't CATCH that fish. I may not the pipe smoking, cane rod and silk line casting, dry fly fishing purist but I don't see a problem turning my nose up at a technique that renders fish overly stressed and injured. If your goal is to put meat in the freezer, by all means fish however you can do that most efficiently. But if your goal is to solve the puzzle, share a moment with a fish and release it unharmed and relatively stress free, why deepthroat em and why catch them on the side of their face? It just doesn't make sense to me...

[Gregg]

You read it wrong, go back. I said I’ve noticed glo-bugs and other egg imitations tied on the shank of the hook taken deeper, and that’s pegged beads always seem to be on the mouth, either right inside or on the mouth right outside, but still on the “lip”. I’ve hooked plenty of fish on dry flies in the corner of the mouth or on the “lip” just outside of it, and my post states that from what I’ve seen, a pegged bead hook is far faster and easier to remove than any other egg imitations. I also said this might be ONLY my experience, I could be completely the statistical anomaly, but wasn’t this technique developed because fish were taking egg patterns too deep? It doesn’t work on me to fudge things and slide in silliness like “on the side of their face”. If someone has experience that pegged beads are a more dangerous “pattern” than an egg fly tied on the hook (which many have never stated a problem with), than please, let me hear it. I’m definitely not the only person wondering and you’d be doing the fly fishing community a solid AND educating fly shops as to why they shouldn’t carry this product. But...if there is no evidence for this claim and it’s just based on heresay or assumptions, and by default we’re saying that egg patterns are “more humane” options and they end up not being, it’s actually a disservice to fishermen and women and fisheries. Holler at me with some data, I enjoy learning more.

[Ralph]

Some rather wild assumptions being made. I am not addressing hooking mortality, we are talking about sporting ethics. 42 states outlaw snagging for the simple reason that it has been judged not an ethical way to fish. Pitch forking, gill netting, and jacklighting are outlawed for the same reason. If the pendulum swings to the point where snagging and pitchforking are judged sporting methods for catching your fish, so be it. A plastic bead glued to a hook fails miserably, while the same bead pegged up leader tricks the fish almost every time. There is a reason for it, the weightless bead bounces and drifts like nothing you can do with a hook attached to the bead. There are MANY things you can do to dumb down fishing, bypass being skillful, and make it easier to catch a fish, but like netting, pitchforking, rubbing a worm on the fly, or other lucrative means of bringing extra fish to hand, sometimes the means doesn't justify the end. Snagging isn't a measure of the skill of any fly fisher, nor is it even fly fishing in any traditional sense of the term, so please don't pretend otherwise.

[Gregg]

And side note... I’ve been fly fishing for a bit now and spend more time on the water than I should probably be. Looking back I have 100% mishandled fish, held them out of the water, done the grip n’ grin, etc. Statistically I’m sure some of those fish didn’t make it after I sent them packing, but not once, ever, have I released a fish and actually watched it go belly up. Maybe I’ve just never played a fish as long as others or opted to fish low / warm water...I don’t know. But I see that posted sometimes and always wonder “how???”. Sportsman rule #1, you kill it, you eat it. That fish goes belly up and it gets Bear Grills’d on the spot. I can’t imagine anything sadder than a fish floating away belly up while the angler just says “oops” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Obvious side note and not meant to derail the topic.