Can't set hook: "Tackle taken out of water"

[Coach]

I've had this happen seldom enough (about three or four times in the last six months) that I thought I might have screwed something up. But it's frequent enough that, combined with other reports like this one from 2016, I think it is some kind of bug.

Originally posted by NightShadow:

This is not the issue with the bobber movement or strike timing. I have this many times recently, one case: I caught the fish, a big Trout, that took me some time to bring it to the shore (some 10 minutes). And then at the moment when I would tackle it at the shore I received this warning (and the fish is gone during tackling!): tackle taken out of water before fish was hooked. 10 minutes of fight with the fish and the fish did not get hooked? It also happened while catching Channel CatFish in LoneStar, just during the tackling the fish gone. I tried different sizes of hooks but still had this problem (hook no between 2 and 8). Anyone can help how to solve it?

Most recently, I had some sort of muskie or large pike on at St. Croix. Normally when a fish is hooked, the reel speed automatically goes to maximum. But the speed didn't change, so I knew he wasn't hooked. I tried jerking the rod (right mouse click) several times, to no effect. I tried putting the rod on the rod stand and picking it up again. No effect.

I know the fish was on the line. I could reel him in closer; he would pull out drag. When the fish moved, I could watch the line move with him. Sometimes I could even see the fish near the surface. These are not subtle signs. Clearly the fish was hooked, but never "officially" set.

Eventually after about an hour in-game time (20+ minutes IRL) I gave up and quit the game.

Have others experienced this? Have you reported it? I can't properly report this event, since I didn't make specific note of the details, but next time I'll shoot the devs an email.

[Julian]

I normally have a bad/slow connection when I have problems like you describe above, becomes almost impossible to catch anything on lures so I either switch to bait, stop and restart the game (resetting the modem and rebooting the PC sometimes) hoping for a better connection or go do something else for a while.