Legal Circle Hook

[flatbottom]

What is legal in tournaments this year pertaining to sharpening a circle hook. How much can be filed off and still maintain its use in tournament play? What are the rules and your interpretation?

[Deep C]

Unless something changes in the next couple weeks the definition of legal circle will include being NON OFFSET and HAVING A POINT PERPENDICULAR TO THE SHAFT. I would think that might be the closed loophole in their reg.

That being said there are a lot of hooks that NMFS and the bunny huggers objected to as being "hybrid" that were not specifically banned. One that effectively is mostly "J" I saw a lot of at the tourney this week and I saw some of our own using it north last year. I wouldn't be surprised to see some creative reshaping taking place...

I'm starting to enjoy the round little buggers. My first go with the model I use was gut hooking and foul hooking but we "tuned" the knot tying and bingo we had a winner. All fish I have caught this season have been using it and of the fish that we bowed up solid not a single loss.