Best Fly Fishing Forceps of 2026

The ratchet is the part that gives out on an inexpensive hemostat, and it's the part the A2Z gets right. Three interlocking positions click in, hold a size 16 hook while you back it out of a lip, and release with a thumb. The curved, fully serrated jaws meet along their length, and the black finish is quiet enough to read as boring rather than tactical — which is exactly what we want clipped to a vest.

Weight is where it wins over the premium pick: 0.634 ounces against 3, so it swings from a zinger without dragging your vest down and disappears in a shirt pocket. The non-stick surface is a smaller advantage that turns out to matter, since fish slime and dried blood wipe off with a thumb instead of needing a scrub at the sink. It's fully autoclavable, a claim you can ignore for fishing that still tells you it survives a rinse.

Five inches is a trout length. It reaches a hook sitting in the scissors of a rainbow's jaw and not much beyond, so if you fish big hooks or fish that swallow, the 6-inch MJW or the 8-inch pair in the Apical set buys you the room. For small-hook river fishing, the A2Z is hard to argue with.

Eight inches is a lot of reach, and it's the reason to look at this box: the longest pair gets your knuckles outside a pike's teeth and reaches a hook that's disappeared down a bass's throat. The rest of the set runs 6.25 and 5 inches in both straight and curved tips, six tools in all.

Every pair carries the same three-position lock and serrated jaws, so the sizes are what separate them. That makes this a distribution set as much as a fishing one: the 8-inch lives in the boat, the 6.25 rides the vest, and the 5-inch ends up in the glovebox or a kid's first tackle box. You aren't choosing a length here — you're getting the lengths.

Our reservation is the smallest pair, which is where the lock gets vague; test that one first and send the box back if it won't latch cleanly. What settles it for us is the range. Six pairs covering everything from a size 20 midge to a 4/0 pike fly is a box you buy once and stop thinking about.

A hook that's gone past the bend is the case for a six-inch pair, and this is the least expensive way to get one. MJW tapers the serrated tips into a fine curve that slides along a hook shank, and the three-step lock clicks in with either hand, which matters when you're holding a fish and reaching over your own wrist.

This is the no-frills reach pick, and we like it for exactly that. No coating, no cutter, no carabiner loop — just stainless, a lock, and a pivot. It's light enough to sit in a shirt pocket, and the curved tip does the one job without ceremony.

The serrations are fine, and that's the boundary of what this one is for. Thin tippet slips between the jaws instead of being held, so treat the MJW as a hook tool and keep a knot tool somewhere else. If your fish are big enough that the hook disappears, six inches of reach is a fair trade for that.

Two pairs, one curved and one straight, both 5.5 inches — the point of this set isn't the tool, it's the habit. Keep the curved pair on the vest and the straight one in the boat box and you stop walking back to the truck for the forceps you left clipped to yesterday's shirt. We like the straight one more than we expected: it's the better shape for flattening a barb and for plucking a fly out of a compartment.

The lock is the weak spot. On the pair that holds, the three positions click in and let go the way they should; on the one that doesn't, the handles pop apart under a squeeze. Clamp a hook and flick the tool before you trust it, and don't wait until a fish is in your hand to find out which pair you got.

At 5.5 inches they sit between the 5-inch A2Z and the 6-inch MJW, which is a good place to be for trout and panfish — enough reach for most hooks without turning the tool into a two-hand job. The straight pair is the sleeper of the two, and it's the one that ends up in the fly box rather than on the vest.