The beaked Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L374 (left), a 2X hook, compared to the more tightly gapped Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L774, a stiffer and heavier 4X hook.
March 05, 2025
By Doug Stange, Editor in Chief
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It’s rare in fishing to have one-size-fits-all situations. Say you’re catching smallmouths like mad on brown hair. That doesn’t prove it’s the best presentation happening right then and there when someone else is doing just fine drop-shotting, and a bit farther down the lake Ned rigging is all the rage. It doesn’t even work to lump finesse tactics together as the best thing going when it’s possible that much more aggressive techniques that haven’t been tried might be even more productive.
So it is with replacement treble hooks, which are a long story, starting with the fact that today many high-end lures have hooks so beautifully matched to the lure design that replacement trebles generally aren’t necessary. In some situations, though, a switch means more fish. Here’s the way I look at replacement trebles.
I divide them into two categories: low-impact trebles and high-impact trebles. Low-impact trebles might be called finesse trebles. They’re high-end hook designs, needle sharp, and with lighter wire (1X or 2X) and, often, smaller to medium barbs. The grabber designs like the Mustad Triple Grip fall in here, too. So, too, a couple of the Eagle Claw Trokar trebles . These are the hooks you want on your cranks when you’re trolling at .8 mph for walleyes in early spring. Or casting suspending stickbaits for smallmouths or largemouths away from cover during prespawn. “Sticky sharp” is the two-word phrase that comes to mind, but that gets applied to most hooks today.
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We could spend a while arguing about which finesse trebles to use when and where. That might be interesting some day, but I think the best advice I have for you is in the realm of high-impact designs. But, be warned, sometimes it takes a bit of wandering in the wilderness to get to the promised land.
Early on when I started fishing in earnest in the 1970s, there weren’t many, if any, sticky sharps to replace the standard round-bend treble hooks that I generally disliked; so I took an early liking to the beaked Eagle Claw 374. I used them on all of my walleye shore-casting lures, as well as any pike and muskie lures requiring treble hooks, usually with the point bent out about 10 degrees, thinking this would further increase hookup percentage, something that was never definitively proven. The 374 was, you might say, a “grabber design” before its time. Of course, beaked hooks were also good (without increasing the gapping) around both timber and weedgrowth.
The first year I fished Stick Marsh (near Fellsmere, Florida), maybe 2004, in February and March, I used 374s on some of my lipless lures, mostly Rattlin’ Rapalas, along with their original hooks. Stick Marsh is big and shallow and some of the best fishing is around woodcover, including stumpage lying along shallow flooded creeks—so flats with old timber about 5 feet deep, with 7-foot channels running through, the fish scattered across the flats or along the channel edges.
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The main tactic was to maneuver with the bowmount, making long casts with the lipless lures, searching across the flats for fish, some of which weighed more than 10 pounds. Meanwhile, we often also dragged live shiners below floats behind the boat. By this time, we were using braid or Berkley FireLine with a short fluoro leader, so not much stretch.
It was quickly apparent how crazy wild the head shakes of those Florida bass were. One of the first giant bass I hooked jumped out of the water a couple feet, right by the boat, and must have shook the lure 50 times back and forth before the lure popped free and almost landed in the boat. Our estimate was that fish were shaking the lure free about 30 percent of the time, a common problem with lipless lures back then and one that continues today—the reason I’m writing this.
#4 Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp L774 replacement trebles on a topwater lure. I also learned that in those stumps and timber, if you leaned hard on bass as soon as they bit, they immediately went up to jump and didn’t try to bury in the timber. So if you leaned on them hard and stayed on them hard they stayed up and not down and you had a chance to land them—still good advice anywhere bass are in cover.
Another thing to consider: When you hang up on timber with a lipless lure you can usually “twang” the lure to pop it free by raising your rod tip high, keeping the line tight to the lure, and using a couple fingers to twang the line between the reel and the first rod guide. Might take a couple twangs but the lure often pops free. (If it doesn’t, the lure always frees itself when you get beyond the snag with the boat.)
The reason the twanging works is because with no-stretch line 2X hooks bend slightly and on the twang the hook snaps back into shape and loosens itself in the timber, enough to often pop free.
Cool. We could fish efficiently through all that cover by getting stuck lures free with the twanging method without having to move the boat all the way to the snagged lure. There remained, however, the problem of losing so many jumping fish.
I tried the 4X-strong Eagle Claw 774s instead of the lighter 2X hooks. Amazing. I don’t think I’ve lost a jumping bass since 2004 (only a slight exaggeration), when the 774s have been in play. (Stick Marsh was great training for Lake Fork and other Texas reservoirs.) Tight gapped and super-stiff 4X hooks don’t bend. It is/was the bending of the 2X hooks under pressure from the angler and the head-shaking bass that rattled the hooks free, just as they do under pressure when they’re snagged and twanged.
As is sometimes the case, the solution to a problem creates another problem. The 774s are too stiff and tightly gapped to twang free. So that means always going to retrieve the lure from timber when they get snagged. No more twanging free. But the tradeoff was very few crazy head-shaking lost fish on lipless lures.
Over the years, the Eagle Claw 774 became the Lazer Sharp L774, a sharper, needlepoint version, which has long been my replacement hook on any of my crankbaits when they’re used in high-impact situations. They’re also my choice for quick-strike rigging for pike. I use them for gator gar and sometimes for river stripers. I put them on rippin’ spoons and lipless lures for largemouths and smallmouths. They’re deadly on topwater lures. Sitting here writing this in early November, I just finished putting L774s on all my newly acquired Red October muskie tubes.
Do I know that the L774 is the best treble-hook for all high-impact situations? I do not. The 774 has been on the market a long time. As I’ve said, the more recent Lazer Sharp version has needle-point hooks and is sharper than the original. It’s also an economical hook choice, as is the L374. Know, too, that there are many other offerings (or offshoots) to the fundamental design of the L774, in a variety of finishes and also hooks that are 3X, instead of 4X.
Now that you know what to look for in principle in high-impact trebles, you may find one you like better. Today there are lots of choices. As for me, they’ll take my L774s when they pry them from my cold stiff hands.
Finally, many anglers have a thing about wide gapping on hooks and believe such gapping always means more hookups. Actually, the opposite can be true. There’s certainly reason for wide-gapping at times—a story for another day. But tight gapping and stiff trebles pin fish.
