How To Make A Fishing Hook

Food is one of the essentials of survival, so it is very important to have some food procurement skills in case you find yourself in a survival situation i.e. being stranded in the wilderness, alone and hungry. Hunting, trapping and foraging are ways to find food in the wild. Fishing is another. In this post, we are going to share with you an easy ‘how to’ on making fishing hooks using available materials. This is a tutorial by Jon Ridgeon, a survival and bushcraft instructor.

How To Make A Fishing Hook

Carve a small piece of wood to the shape shown in the photo…

Find suitable thorns, in this example I used Black Thorn thorns. The sharper the better. Be careful not to blunten the sharp tip of the thorns because this makes the hook so much more effective.

I scraped the thin bark layer off my thorn but this is not necessary. You can see how the tree has allowed the tip of the thorn to die so that it is harder and sharper on the end.

The thorn in this picture is not attached to the wood…but you could stick it to the wood with a very small amount of Pine resin or other glue to make binding the thorn less fiddly

Make a length of very thin cordage or you can just use a plain length of some kind of strong fibre.

Put the thorn through the eye on the end of the cordage.

Hopefully the following pictures explain themselves and show how to bind the thorn to the wood.

Continue wrapping the string around the stem of the hook and then to finish it off pass the end underneath the last couple of wraps and pull tight.

Finished hook… It would have been better to carve the top of the hook so that it is easier to attach the line. Have fun!