The blood loop, used here to create a stand-off boom to take a hook snood, uses no additional components like swivels, beads, crimps or stop knots. As Paul Kerry explains it is cheap, does the job and you won’t mind losing it in a snag

The blood loop is probably the most basic fixed-point method of attaching your hook snood to a paternoster style trace body.

It is simple, reasonably effective and cheap making it ideal if you fish rough ground where tackle losses are likely to be quite high.

More importantly it is one of the essential basic knots for sea angling and in this case I’m using it to create a simple stand-off boom.

From this knot there are several variations that are useful for snood connections on different trace set-ups and I will be looking at these in the months ahead.