So, you've made the cast of the month to a really nice Bonefish right in the middle of a mess of mangroves. The fish eats your fly, you strip set perfectly, and the fish proceeds to leave the country. As usual, the fish goes around as many mangrove roots as possible at somewhere around Mach 2.
What do you do? Most of us will just exert as much pressure as possible, trying to stop the Bonefish. Not going to happen...ever! Often the fish will go around enough roots, in enough different directions, until he just breaks off.
When this happens next time try this:
1) immediately drop the rod tip
2) if the fish isn't on the reel yet let it go slack, if it is on the reel quickly strip off two or three pulls of line.
3) let the fish swim with no pull on the line.
More often than not the Bonefish will immediately settle down and stop. This will allow you to move on foot, or position the skiff so that you can untangle your fly line from the mangrove roots and slowly reel in your line as you get closer to the fish. Once you get close to the fish you can resume pressure and maybe land the fish. Sometimes you may even have to repeat giving the fish slack a couple of times before you can land the fish.
Don't loosen your drag to try and accomplish this. First of all you can't mess with your drag near quick enough. Just quickly tug a couple arm lengths of line off the reel to give slack. If that isn't enough to get the fish to stop then it just wasn't meant to be. Second, if you kick the drag off and then the fish, or you, pull any line off quickly you're going to have a major birds nest on your reel.
This doesn't work every time. But it does work fairly often. It may mean having some chance where there was no chance before.
