The hangback style is firmly entrenched in virtually all my fishing applications for salmon trout and steelhead. The whole point is to prevent the hook from ever entering the fish's mouth at the time of the willful strike. It's been the backbone of my arsenal since 2004.

The rare hangback hook finds its way in there once in a great while. Over a sample size of thousands of fish, the incidence of a mortal hooking wound is right at 1%.... and virtually all of those have been hooked in the base of the tongue or the first gill arch (raked).

I started experimenting with circles for salmon trolling about 5 years ago.... with the objective of reducing that mortal hooking percentage even further. In the hangback application, the circle still plants itself outside-in during well over 95% of hookups. In the unusual event that the hook is actually engulfed, the only place it can really find a purchase is in the scissors.... inside-out. Mortal hooking wounds should theoretically be statistically indistinguishable from ZERO. In practice, that's also how it happens to have worked out as well.... so far at least.

Next step was to introduce circles into my backbouncing program. Backbouncing bait has historically resulted in the highest incidence of mortal bleeders of any technique I've ever used for salmon/steel. And why wouldn't it? The bait is fed DEEP to the fish at the time of the strike.... fully encouraging the fish to swallow it. The hangback amputee made a big difference in securing more bites outside-in, but whenever a big king choked down the whole rigging, it wasn't gonna be pretty. This is the sickening outcome I've been seeking to eliminate.



Enter the hangback circle for bouncing bait. Very limited sample size to date, but so far so good. While no hooks have been taken in the mouth yet, I'm pretty confident that the incidence of mortal bleeders will turn out to be statistically indistinguishable from ZERO... even when the entire rig is willfully ingested by a huge king.