Jiāng Xuě

I think this beautiful Chinese poem called 'River Snow' portrays an appropriate image of these times. With all this harsh weather I can but only think about angling from the comfort of my warm home drinking hot cocoa.

 This roughly translates as:

Thousands of mountains and no bird in flight

Tens of thousands of paths where the footprints disappeared

A lonely old man in a boat with bamboo cloak and hat

Angles alone in the cold river snow

Knot for the spade end hook

This spade-end hook knot is by far my favorite. Simple and strong, it can be used with fairly low diameter nylon and needs less lubrication than most. I usually wet the hook-length with water or saliva before tying it but even if you don't it still tightens up in a way that doesn't damage the line. The basic diagram is this:

How I tie it:

The piece of line that I twist around the shank about ten times gets fairly twisted but it straightens up once it gets pulled on the other side. The ends must be pulled to tighten properly afterwards.