Hey all, I've been following this thread for a while and finally made an account after finding some stuff I thought might be worth sharing
I was getting particularly annoyed with the cutscene involved with getting the flippers so I thought I'd see if it were possible to get to the HoG without them (although this may never really be useful in a run, but whatever).
Anyway, you can use the Crow south of HoG to get Link onto the raised area of water with a simple damage boost (probably obvious):
And from there you can hookshot the ladder on the dock, but unfortunately the dock is too high (I guess?) for Link to actually make it all the way across--he just falls in the water...
Different angles don't really seem to help as far as I can tell, but I got creative and figured out a way across: apparently icebergs created with the ice rod can shift Link's position mid-hookshot to *somehow* allow him to make it onto the dock without falling off:
This "Bergshot" really isn't even hard to pull off. A few different setups work, including diagonals. Here's a setup that makes only involves Link brushing up the side of one iceberg:
The problem: this doesn't seem to work with the rented/normal hookshot. I guess it's too slow? I've tried every setup I can think of and can't get it to work, even trying to quickly drop multiple icebergs with the normal/rented ice rod to see if that somehow makes a difference. Maybe someone can figure out some way to make it work... I suppose it's worth noting that the crow used to damage boost into this area actually follows you a pretty good distance, and that mashing X/Y as Link falls into the water does actually let you use an item really quickly. I got the tornado rod to work for a split second here (not that anything came of it):
Bonus: Icebergs can be used to activate animation storage (although I can't think of where this would be useful):
One final thing: This might be obvious, but I couldn't find any mention of it in the thread... You can freeze this spinny thing to make the timing for the F1 ToH mergeless skip easier: