Techniques: Using a Sweep Set

We all know that timing the hook-set can make or break a day of fishing. But what do you do when you’ve just made the perfect slack-line cast to achieve an ideal drift — and a trout suddenly takes your fly? Phil Monahan suggests learning the “sweep set.”
Excerpt: “This is a useful technique when you’re either fishing downstream or have a lot of slack on the water—for instance when you’re making slack-line casts, such as a pile cast or a curve cast. Because there’s a lot of slack on the water, if you simply raise your rod tip, all you’re doing is picking up the slack. Depending on how much slack you have between you and your fly, you might never even put any tension on the fly itself this way. No tension on the fly often means no hookup.”