Toadfish Line Nippers

Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of why a fly angler needs to spend $50, or even $100, for a simple pair of nippers to trim leaders, tippet and such, when my grandfather managed to fish his entire lifetime, with great effect, using only cheap toenail clippers he bought at the drugstore.

Don’t get me wrong, I get it: fancy designs and space-age nipper blades account for something, and yeah, I bought some of those brown-trout-spotted nippers to hang off my, admittedly, old-school Filson fishing vest, for no other reason than I thought they looked cool. 

That said, I recently got wind of some new nippers offered by an upstart company called Toadfish, which keys on the saltwater and conventional gear realms, and I thought I’d give them a try in trout country.

A few things stood out right away.  

First, they aren’t “pincher” nippers–they’re more like teeny-tiny scissors with blunt tips. The cutting jaws are on one side, and you simply work them like you would a pair of micro garden shears between your thumb and index finger. 

I actually liked that. Clipping a tippet tag end off a recently tied-on fly is akin to pruning a bonsai tree: It’s deliberate, purposeful and shapely.  

But why not just use scissors? Because pointed scissors will poke and stab you, and while they are invaluable at the fly-tying bench, they don’t belong in certain other fishy environs where the points might cause larger issues, like rafts and float tubes.  

The knocks are pretty straightforward.

The cutting blades are only on one side, so you find yourself constantly flipping them over.

If you’re used to pushing and pinching flat edges against a knot, which most of us are, you have to mentally adjust to scissor mode.

The zinger-retractor is cool. It’s even magnetic, so you have the option of pinning them onto a vest, or pack, or simply slapping them on a metallic surface, which is what I did as I fished the Yampa River from my drift boat the other day. 

The company touts tungsten carbide blades that will cut through thick materials. I’m going to wait to pass judgment on the durability factor, but in the trout context, I was actually more interested in the “thin” factor and the ability to precisely cleave through 6X tippet, at angles, without re-dos and double pinches/futzing around.  

I thought they did fine.  

At the end of the day, for $24, instead of $100, for something to perform as menial a task as trimming tippet for the trout angler, I consider this a welcome reality check that’s somewhere between drugstore nippers and avant garde fishing tools.