What should a fisherman look for in a knife? The short unhelpful answer is - “it depends on what you want to use it for”, but let’s expand a little. The suitability of a knife is obviously determined by the use to which it will be put. Most knives for outdoor use are employed in a variety of ways, which means that if you are restricted to carrying one knife only, then you need to look for a general utility knife that combines differing features, i.e. a set of compromises, but within limits. Let’s look at those limits.

Usage: The first decision is to pin down the intended uses. For a fisherman, this is likely to include cleaning and filleting fish, cutting line or rope or tangled netting, cutting wood, sharpening sticks, whittling, and general outdoor camp craft uses. If you only want to carry one knife, then it’s important to choose a blade that can do most of these jobs reasonably well. If you can carry two knives, then it’s best to choose two that specialise in diametrically different jobs. This is often a choice between slicing (say, filleting), cutting (say, rope) and/or working with the point (say, gouging open a clam).

Basic blade structure: Efficient slicing is best done with a convex blade, whilst cutting is best with a straight blade. If both are required in one knife then a good compromise is either a drop-point blade or a clip-point with some belly for slicing. Cutting rope or bone is easier with a serrated edge, which need not run the length of the blade, but here we are getting to a trade-off between slicing and sawing, which is more difficult to achieve in one blade. In this situation I advise having two knives, one for slicing and one for sawing/cutting. A quillon is advisable if the knife is to be used extensively in wet conditions or in skinning.

Blade point: If a strong point is needed, say for prising open clams, then some weight in the tip is helpful as in a drop-point blade. If more delicate but a sharper/thinner point is needed, for whittling for example, then a clip-point would be more appropriate. A very strong point is inherent in a tanto blade, but overall this blade is unsuitable for outdoor activities. Some mariners’ knives have a blunt point to avoid injury to fellow crew members, should the knife be dropped from the rigging.

Fixed v. folding: This decision is partly determined by the length of blade required: a long skinning blade cannot easily be packaged within a folding knife in a secure way.

Also the local knife laws need to be taken into account, which may determine this decision. A folding knife is safer if it has a locking blade and is more discrete than a fixed blade.

Blade steel: A blade needs to have good edge retention, ease of re-sharpening, strength and rust resistance. Many knives on the market do not specify the steel used. However if you are buying a custom knife then opt for one of the following steels: S30V; ATS-34 (premium grade of stainless steel used by most custom knife makers. It is Japanese steel, owned by Hitachi Steels. The American made equivalent of ATS-34 is 154CM); CPM-T440V - viewed as the "super steel", it outlasts all stainless steels on the market today. It is, however, harder to resharpen due to its unprecedented edge retention. But the trade-off is that you do not have to sharpen as frequently. CPM-T440V is widely used by custom knife makers and is slowly finding its way into high-end or gentlemen's folding knives.

Handle: A good handle is essential and should be comfortable and sized for the hand with or without gloves, depending on the environment. The blade should extend to the back of the handle for strength (“full tang”), the material should be water-resistant and slip-proof, and if skinning and filleting is a frequent job, the handle should have a slip stop at the base. Materials should be durable – dropping a knife usually means that the handle hits the ground first. Finally the handle should be pleasing to look at. Natural materials like stag or wood look great but a workhorse handle is probably better made from slip proof Zytel or something similar. Micarta is a very popular and hard wearing synthetic, but it is very slippery. Finally a lanyard hole is useful in fishing applications, for obvious reasons, but few knives seem to have them.

Components: Check that locking components, liners etc are made in a suitable material – rust proof at the least.

 Note on UK knife laws

I am no expert on UK knife laws (so please check for yourselves), but it feels to me that if you adopt common sense then you should be OK. The question to ask yourself is “how suitable is it for me to have this knife, here, at this moment?” A 6” filleting knife on a riverside camp whilst preparing a barbecue seems appropriate. Wearing one on the High Street is not. Please check legality for yourself before you buy a knife – my understanding is that The Criminal Justice Act (1988) says that you may carry a knife with a blade length of 3.0" or less so long as it is capable of folding and it is in an appropriate place. That means no fixed blade knives. If you wish to carry a larger knife then you must have 'reasonable cause', and it must be appropriate to the situation.

For a selection of my fishing knives see here.

The knives are as follows:

Finnish Puulkko - this fixed blade knife has a short double-sided blade with a blunt tip. On one side is the cutting edge, the other side is a serrated edge for de-scaling fish.  The handle is non-slip and large to accommodate gloves. This is my knife of choice when on the river.

Thai Foldable - This foldable is of ATS-34 steel with Coccobola and mammoth ivory scales and a ray-skin sheath. I picked it up in Thailand where I found a custom knife maker. The point is very sharp but weak, so not suitable for heavy-duty work around a camp-site. But it's pretty.

Frosts -  A cheap but strong fixed blade knife with  a very good non-slip handle.  It used to be first choice knife with Forestry Commission rangers. It only cost £14  some 6 years ago and is my choice of knife around the camp-site.

French foldable -  I am not sure of the steel used in this knife, which I found in a small knife-making shop in the backstreets of Perigeaux in France. I liked the wooden handle and in particular the leather sheath that came with it.

Brusletto -  I bought this Brusletto near Bergen in Norway. Strong, wide handle.

 AT Barr - the final two foldables are from the well-known knife maker, A T Barr. The first has G10 scales. The second has desert ironwood scales. Both are from ATS-34 steel and are a delight to use.

Acknowledgments

In writing this article, I have benefited enormously from various web-sites and articles including:

Knifeart

Knifemakersguild

So here was my evolution and reasons for moving on.

Stage 1 - My first vest was a Hardy.  It was super-light and quite expensive but I quickly discovered that it was too lightweight for what I thought I needed at the time.

Stage 2 - A Simms fly-vest, well made with more room. 
Simms

Stage 3 - What I wanted was a vest that I could wear over the top of a waterproof or wading jacket, so I bought a Patagonia, which was made of synthetic material that did not get water-logged in the rain. Quite functional and comfortable. After a time I started to question whether I really wanted so many things hanging off me like a christmas tree every time I went down to the river. I could never remember which pocket had what. Also, having done some military training, old habits die hard and it seemed "untactical" to have gear hanging off you.

Stage 4 - Dispensed with fly-vests. Most of my fly-fishing seems to be done in the rain or wind anyway, so I decided to use a wading jacket with the necessary pockets and attachment points in combination with a small shoulder strap bag. I bought an Orvis wading jacket.  I liked the bag because you can see into it. The jacket is well made but the design is questionable. The top pockets can only be accessed horizontally which means that it's tricky to get into a pocket using only one hand.

 Bag

Stage 5 -  Decided to invest in in a William Joseph small chest pack to go over or underneath the wading jacket. I think I might have finally cracked it (perhaps?)!
 

There do not appear to be many articles or books written on fly-fishing hooks, which is surprising since the hook is one of the most important components of the set-up. The only comprehensive review I have found is Dick Stewart's "The Hook Book", published in 1986 and therefore out of date given all of the developments in hook technology in the last 10 years.

This page will build up descriptions and my views on some of them. It is work-in-progress. You will need Excel to view the files.

Tiemco fly hooks

Well, where to start? The same question you ask yourself at the start of each day looking out onto this vast lake, one of the largest brown trout wildernesses in Europe. Padraig, one of the best ghillies in the world, (but it's best that he does not know this), meets us at Colnamuck and we stash the gear on the boat, few words uttered, as we have been through the routine over fifty times over the last 7 years.

The wind is moderate, from the north-west and the met gives showers building for the afternoon, winds picking up to force 6/7, gusting 8 at times. The big long drifts between Inchagill and Micatreer would be suicidal today, May 17th, so we steam down to Lees Island opposite Burnt House, where we know we can drift sensibly and escape if the met proves optimistic.

Padraig knows these waters intimately. Knowing that he was a skipper on a trawler for many years, my fishing partner, Rob and I can relax, confident in his judgement. Corrib, being a very shallow limestone lough, has hundreds of rocks just under the water-line ready to rip open the hull of the boat. Padraig seems to know where each one is. The weather is more like what you would expect out in open sea - quickly changing from calm to squall.

We decide to dap mayflies- the traditional approach for these waters. The first drift nets us 7 trout up to 2 lbs in size. There is a nice ripple on the water and a good breeze means that we do not need to use a blow-line. Some mayfly are in evidence, but the main hatch is olives. The swallows, always good indicators of fly-life, swoop down by the boat to take flies.

The next few drifts are not quite as productive, but by lunchtime we have caught 16 trout. Lunch is had on Lees Island in pouring rain, but we find enough wood to make sure the Kelly kettle sings its tune. We are joined for lunch by two other boats, local fishermen friends from previous years and the craic gets going.

In the afternoon the wind freshens, gusting force 8 or 9 and it's all we can do to keep the flies on the water, rods held out parallel to the water. The weather out at Inchagill would have been suicidal, force 10, and reminded me of the time in a previous year when we rescued two fishermen whose motor had stalled and they had drifted onto rocks in a force 9.

But we still catch trout. "Another day in paradise" as John Gierach once said.

Day 2

Still, no wind, lifeless, bright sunshine. The lake is a flat calm. Dapping is off, the dry fly will be difficult in the bright conditions, the wet fly will be difficult with no wave. So it's either buzzers on sinking lines or trolling. We plump for trolling. When I first went to Corrib quite a few years ago, I had a rather puritanical "dry-fly ethic" approach to fly-fishing which made it difficult for me to enjoy trolling. I have learnt however that there is a real craft and skill to trolling well and that every method has its time and place.

On Corrib, the trolling fishermen are a breed apart. Out in all weathers, dawn to dusk, single fishermen at the stern, hoods up, squinting eyes that come from hours of searching for hidden dangers, taciturn,  private, searching favourite and secretly held waters for large ferox trout. Padraig is an expert, always devising new rigs, improvising at new depths, improving every facet of his home-made kit. And the details and locations are jealously guarded.

Padraig's expertise was up to the mark on this day. We caught three ferox trout, one just under 20 lbs, one at 13 lbs and one at 9 lbs, beautiful stunning fish, un-catchable on a fly. With the two smaller fish returned, we rushed back to the shore to get the larger trout officially weighed as it looked close to Corrib's record, but it missed out by a couple of pounds. (The record stands at 22 lbs). Padraig swears that he once saw a trout substantially bigger than this one in shallow water. Who knows, perhaps there is a 25 or 30 lb ferox trout out there?

Day 3

Force 9 or 10. Not even we were that stupid, so it was off to a small lake and stream in the Connemara hills. And then, cold and wet, back to the peat fire at the "pub with no name", for Guinness or an Irish Whiskey or two.

Final thoughts

This is a wonderful place but under huge ecological pressure. I really hope the local politicians can take control, but the evidence of the past years is that they are not good at this.

The Kootenai river flows south, down the Rocky Mountain Trench that divides the Rockies from the Columbia mountains, into Montana, then Idaho before it re-appears in British Columbia again to join the great Columbia river system. Along the northern edge of the Trench, clear rivers with high channel gradients plunge from the continental divide down steep heavily forested mountain canyons. The Elk, the White, the Lussier, the Wigwam and the river I had come to fish, the Bull.

The Bull is of special importance; it is dammed in its lower section, thereby creating a respite habitat above the dam for native greenslope cutthroat trout (“cutts”). In the Rockies the more vigorous rainbows are slowly displacing cutts, or in some areas rainbows are interbreeding with cutts forming hybrids (“cuttbows”). The dam has created an enclave population and a wild fishery that is as close to a natural Rocky Mountain habitat as you can get.

One of the first things you notice when you fish the Bull is the clarity of the water, due to the resistant quartzite and metamorphic PreCambrian bedrock. The water is slightly alkaline and the riverbed is a mixture of gravels, sand and hard rock supporting a perfect habitat for many water insects.  And it is the abundance of certain species of fly-life, Caddis and everywhere the cases of the stonefly were in evidence, and the clarity of the water, that determines the character of the fishing.

The cutts in the pocket water were not shy to come to the fly if the presentation was right. On four consecutive days I landed a fish on either the first or the second cast of the day. In recent times there has been little human fishing pressure, and therefore the trout are not educated by UK standards.  However there is intense predation of trout. The area is rich in top carnivores including Ospreys, Eagles, Otters and Mink. On several occasions I saw cutts that bore the talon marks of Ospreys.

And it is this significant level of predation, particularly from the air, that I think explains the character of the fishing. The water is fast moving, but everywhere punctuated by rocks and boulders or logs. The pools are very clear and some extremely deep, particularly along the canyon sections. The fish therefore prefer to hold in very small areas of slow water next to broken water, or deep in the pools. This strategy minimises the fish’s risks of being seen from the air.

Fly or presentation?

After the second day of fishing and over 50 trout caught and released (the Bull is catch & release with a maximum of two fish allowed to be killed per day - only one fly is allowed,) it became increasingly apparent that catching the larger cutts required different tactics. The cutts from the pocket water averaged 14 inches – a 16 incher was a good fish. But the larger cutts dominate the deep pools and grow on to 20 or so inches.

We targeted the larger cutts in the canyon pools, but these were a different proposition: these deep-holding trout were much more wary, having more time to inspect the offering and being more exposed in the crystal clear water. The Parachute Adams, the Griffiths Gnat, Elk Hair Caddis, so successful in the pocket water, did little to move them. We tried attractors, nymphs, wet fly on the lift, 15-foot leaders, size 6 tippets, and so on but without success. I still think about these larger cutts as I sit at my fly-tying table in the Winter. Perhaps a slightly weighted wet F fly made from grey CDC with a hint of sparkle in the body? Or perhaps it was the presentation rather than the fly? I will never know unless I go back!.

Yes it certainly felt to me like I might have been fishing Montana 40 years ago. I did not see another angler, indeed anyone else other than my fishing partner, the whole 5 days I was there over a 10 km stretch.

The Kootenai river flows south, down the Rocky Mountain Trench that divides the Rockies from the Columbia mountains, into Montana, then Idaho before it re-appears in British Columbia again to join the great Columbia river system. Along the northern edge of the Trench, clear rivers with high channel gradients plunge from the continental divide down steep heavily forested mountain canyons. The Elk, the White, the Lussier, the Wigwam and the river I had come to fish, the Bull.

The Bull is of special importance; it is dammed in its lower section, thereby creating a respite habitat above the dam for native greenslope cutthroat trout (“cutts”). In the Rockies the more vigorous rainbows are slowly displacing cutts, or in some areas rainbows are interbreeding with cutts forming hybrids (“cuttbows”). The dam has created an enclave population and a wild fishery that is as close to a natural Rocky Mountain habitat as you can get.

One of the first things you notice when you fish the Bull is the clarity of the water, due to the resistant quartzite and metamorphic PreCambrian bedrock. The water is slightly alkaline and the riverbed is a mixture of gravels, sand and hard rock supporting a perfect habitat for many water insects.  And it is the abundance of certain species of fly-life, Caddis and everywhere the cases of the stonefly were in evidence, and the clarity of the water, that determines the character of the fishing.

The cutts in the pocket water were not shy to come to the fly if the presentation was right. On four consecutive days I landed a fish on either the first or the second cast of the day. In recent times there has been little human fishing pressure, and therefore the trout are not educated by UK standards.  However there is intense predation of trout. The area is rich in top carnivores including Ospreys, Eagles, Otters and Mink. On several occasions I saw cutts that bore the talon marks of Ospreys.

And it is this significant level of predation, particularly from the air, that I think explains the character of the fishing. The water is fast moving, but everywhere punctuated by rocks and boulders or logs. The pools are very clear and some extremely deep, particularly along the canyon sections. The fish therefore prefer to hold in very small areas of slow water next to broken water, or deep in the pools. This strategy minimises the fish’s risks of being seen from the air.

Fly or presentation?

After the second day of fishing and over 50 trout caught and released (the Bull is catch & release with a maximum of two fish allowed to be killed per day - only one fly is allowed,) it became increasingly apparent that catching the larger cutts required different tactics. The cutts from the pocket water averaged 14 inches – a 16 incher was a good fish. But the larger cutts dominate the deep pools and grow on to 20 or so inches.

We targeted the larger cutts in the canyon pools, but these were a different proposition: these deep-holding trout were much more wary, having more time to inspect the offering and being more exposed in the crystal clear water. The Parachute Adams, the Griffiths Gnat, Elk Hair Caddis, so successful in the pocket water, did little to move them. We tried attractors, nymphs, wet fly on the lift, 15-foot leaders, size 6 tippets, and so on but without success. I still think about these larger cutts as I sit at my fly-tying table in the Winter. Perhaps a slightly weighted wet F fly made from grey CDC with a hint of sparkle in the body? Or perhaps it was the presentation rather than the fly? I will never know unless I go back!.

Yes it certainly felt to me like I might have been fishing Montana 40 years ago. I did not see another angler, indeed anyone else other than my fishing partner, the whole 5 days I was there over a 10 km stretch.