Fishing Rod Entity-Reeling Is Inconsistent

I'm creating a Capture the Flag game using the new 1.9 features, and want to include a "Striker" class that uses its high mobility to harass the enemy team. One of its items will be a fishing rod meant to lure in enemies and disrupt their movement (or just cause a lot of fall damage). Although the new "magnetic" attachment that the fishing bobber has works well, the actual reeling in does not always occur.

When a fishing rod user gets the bobber attached to an entity, I expect that using the rod again to reel in the bobber will also pull the entity towards the user. Instead, the entity will often be unaffected by the bobber; this occurs regardless of how far away the rod user is, height differences, etc.