Well, everyone else and his brother have jumped in here so why not? In response to the question, best paraphrased "how do you know if the fish bit or you lined it?" - well, you don't, unless you design your gear to facilitate lining over biting and know in advance that is what is going on. Things like leaders longer than 2 feet facilitate lining, so do using things like small corkies that hold your long leader at fish mouth elevation above the bottom. Unfortunately, so does fly fishing for stacked up adult salmonids with deepwater express, which is why I don't do much of it anymore (yep, I'm in the camp that prefers the fish bite rather than bite the fish myself). I too didn't realize what was going on - I thought that if you used a fly line and a single barbless hook there was no way you could purposefully snag fish - until I found a perftect fly pool on the Satsop one dry fall that had tons of huge bright chum stacked in it that fell for the fly one after the other I thought - until one afternoon when the backlight was just right and I could see what was going on. The relatively short 3 foot leader I was using would touch their teeth breifly, they would open their mouths wide and shake their head, and in would go the fly. All the fish I hooked were caught on the inside of the mouth in the corner of the jaw on the same side I was standing on, but none if them bit the fly, the fly always bit them. The fact that I wasn't trying to snag fish and that I always c&r'd them didn't matter to me - I was snagging and all the fun went out of it, even though it was prior to that time - and still would be if I could make them bite - a blast fighting huge chum on my low-tech knuckle buster fly gear. This is, however, a personal problem that I would not foist onto others who enjoy the landing no matter how they catch them - and for you for whom ignorance is bliss, sorry.