trying too hard.... (a sockeyer's worst tendency)
If there is one piece of advice I could throw out to all serious sockeyers it would be this: patience. Be patient when fishing. My biggest failures and foul-hookings always occur when I start trying too hard. It's almost a Star Wars-use-the-force-Luke kinda thing. You know the fish are there; they are rolling, you see other people hooking up....so you start tugging a little harder each and every cast. The problem is that the farther down the path of the 'dark side' that you go, the more often your hook-ups will end up as foul-hooks. Granted, by tugging harder and trying harder you will typically 'hook' more fish...but that really isn't the goal. The true goal of a sockeyer is to mouth-hook the most fish possible. So when I find myself starting to foul hook fish I have to mentally tell myself to relax and slow down. Be patient. I force myself to go back to the slow drift technique that yields mouth-hooked fish. And when I finally get back into that patient, slow drift zone, I usually find that I can hook as many if not more fish than anyone else (which I typically do anyways) and the major portion of them are fair-hooked in the mouth. Amen.
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