Today's knot of the day is a fishing knot that has been around for decades, the Rapala Knot .
I have been using this knot for about fifteen years and could never understand why it would fail.
All of a sudden today, I was tying it up and having problems, so I started to dig deeper into why it failed.
The first thing I did was watch a video of how to tie it up, which was very similar what I do, but there are some key points that are not included in the video.
The next step was to go back and read all the other articles on fishing knots and see if they talked about the Rapala Knot and if they gave some insight on why it fails.
The first article I read was actually one of my articles, where I talked about how to manage your fishing knots . Some times when you get in a hurry things do not work out so well.
Then I got thinking, what is so special about the Rapala Knot?
If you notice in the video it shows how to tie the knot, but there are no visuals on how it looks while tied. I went back and looked at some of my old pictures that I took when tying some knots up and one picture caught my eye.
There was a loop on the end of the line and a loop at the end of the leader. Now this is called a double fisherman's knot, which was made famous by Lefty Kreh back in the early days.
Well what I found out today is that you need to make sure that both loops are facing down when tying it up or it will fail just as you would tie up the double fisherman's knot.
By allowing these loops to be facing opposite of each other is how it gets hung up in the guides when you are bringing your line in or when you set the hook on a fish. It will actually get caught in between the guides and either put you into freespool or fine tune.
Just to show you what I am talking about, here is a picture of the Rapala Knot that was taken years ago and then another one with it tied up correctly. You can see that there is no tension on the knot where as the other one has some.
This is also done with a leader knot called a Uni-knot . This knot works real well with braided line so you can have some stretch, but the Rapala Knot uses mono, so you would not want to use this knot.
After thinking about it, that is probably why I never had a problem with this knot before. It was because most of my fishing has been done with braided line.
So as you can tell from this article, if you have been using the Rapala Knot and having problems or just think that it is not a good knot to use. You will now understand why and be able to change over to another knot like the Improved Clinch Knot , which is my favorite and most used fishing knot.
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