|
Information on the usage of correct leaders for fly fishing with wet and dry flies. Includes methods for trout, salmon, and other fly fish.
Correct Leaders for Fly Fishing In fly casting, your ability to develop fish-taking delicacy depends a great deal on a carefully selected leader more so than on the proper choice of either fly line or fly. The proper leader is essential for a long cast. Carefully selected leaders are a must in fishing deeply sunken wet flies. Even a worm, properly fished, requires careful leader selection. Leaders, however, are the one essential link in successful fishing which is most often neglected. If your fly pattern is right for the water and season, and you are still not taking fish consistently, give your leader plenty of thought. It may have a half dozen things wrong with it, with none of them being casually apparent. A leader may be too short, too heavy, not tapered properly. The material may not be right for the type of fishing you are attempting. Take a too-short leader for mid-season stream conditions water low, quiet, and clear. You may have carefully matched the hatch presently over the water, and your fly may be a perfect duplicate both as to color and size. But unless you have matched these low water conditions with a proper leader, you have canceled out an otherwise acceptable fly pattern. There is a best length and a best taper for these low-water conditions. Most commercial leaders start with a butt which is too light for the length of leader required for best low-water results. This, apparently, is done in an effort to get a very light, inconspicuous link between line and fly. Such leaders are very difficult to cast except when there is a wind coming directly from behind the angler. These commercial leaders, with a butt section calibrating .015 or smaller, should be avoided. A butt section of .021 is very much better. This section should be at least 30 inches long in order to turn over the leader properly on the cast. The next section should be .020 in diameter and 20 inches long, followed by these sections: .018, 14 inches long; .016, 8 inches long; .014, 8 inches long; .012, 8 inches long; .011, 6 inches long; .009, 6 inches long; and a .008 tippet (3X) 27 inches long. This makes a leader just slightly less than twelve feet in length, It will cast wonderfully well, except in a stiff breeze. Where excep tionally clear, low water must be fished, and the trout are very shy, many anglers drop down another calibration to a 4X tippet on this leader. Some anglers will go to even smaller gut tippets, using a 5X one. But very few rods are responsive enough to keep trout from breaking out on the strike when such fine gut is used. Actually, only the English-type wet-fly action is at all practical with such a spider web for a leader tippet. A long, well-tapered leader is not only a good clear-water ter minal rig, it is also best for small wet flies, nymphs, and dry flies. Where small flies are used, nothing will kill their action more effec tively than a heavy leader. Hence, when using these small creations, it is imperative that the leader tippet be carefully matched to their size. It is very doubtful whether any fly smaller than a number 12 can be fished with a IX tippet or larger, if the full fish-taking poten tial of the fly and the method is to be realized. That doesn't mean fish cannot be taken on such a setup, but it does mean that when water conditions and the hatch indicate a size 12 or smaller fly, careful consideration must be given to the leader for a complete matching. Most anglers are familiar with a double-tapered fly line, but few realize that there are also double-tapered leaders which work beau tifully for certain types of flies. This isn't such a startling innovation as it would seem, however a double-tapered leader is just an ordinary tapered leader with a heavy hinge section about thirty inches from the butt. A typical double-tapered leader is made about as follows: butt section .020 or .021, then a drop to .016, then a heavy section 14 to 16 inches long, calibrating .019. The taper falls away from this hinge section progressively, just as it does in the conven tional tapered leader, ending in a 2X or 3X tippet. This is a very good leader to use with the larger flies, such as the BiVisible dry flies or the Fanwing, which offer considerable air resistance in casting. A happy thought in leaders is invisibility. If that could be obtained, many problems of terminal tackle would be solved. Tests have been conducted to find the effects of leader color on fish, and grey mist color has been found to be the least disturbing to trout. The next best color was a bluish green. Fish see the leader against the skylight, and these two colors proved the least conspicuous under those conditions in clear water. On lakes and streams where water is stained marsh brown, darker colored leaders gave best results. But even if we had completely invisible leaders, much careful thought would still have to be given to proper leader size and length. Unnatural movement of flies and other lures, imparted by improper size leaders, would still be there to plague the angler. I had an example of this one summer, while fishing a wilderness river. These trout were seldom fished over maybe three or four times during the season so we were careless about our leaders. The size of those rainbows was also a factor in our selectionl Those big sixteenand eighteen-inch rainbows were plainly visible at the heads of the pools, in the green-blue water. Occasionally they moved out of position slightly to investigate anything carried by the current following surface drift downstream, then tipping up to touch it in the dry fly water, spearing a hapless may fly from a scattering hatch. Dry flies were indicated. Since this was a wilderness river, with big trout plainly visible, we rigged with heavy leaders. Mine was a 9 foot, tapering to a OX tippet. My choice of fly was a March Brown on a number 12 hook because a small brown complementing may fly was over the water. The correctness of this color selection was further indicated by those trout occasionally tipping up to spear small bits of brown drift on the surface. I cast over those trout for a full half hour. They investigated my fly with a few casual turnovers, breaking water beautifully, but never actually touched my offering. Eventually, I tipped my fly on a back cast, breaking off the barb. I snipped it off and tossed it on the water. From behind a sunken boulder a big rainbow came. He smashed that jauntily cocked fly in a foam-flecked eddy, coming out full length above the surface. I immediately tied on another leader, dropping down to 5X tippet. Maybe you have already guessed what happened. I left a number 12 March Brown sticking in the lip of a big rainbow, at least nineteen inches long. I had really gone from one extreme to another. A 5X gut, with a breaking strength of .9 pound, is not a tippet for rough water and big trout In quiet water, however, and with a very soft-action rod, it is sometimes the only way you can take fish. After breaking out twice with 5X tippets, I tried a 4X. Within an hour I had managed to take a pair of beautiful rainbows, measur ing eighteen and seventeen inches. But the large one, which had taken my unattached fly, never rose again, a disappointment which was tempered by the two beauties I had in my creel. Proper leaders and light tippets are not only indicated for small flies in low clear water, but are also best when fishing a worm or small spinner-fly combination. A worm or a spinner-fly requires just as much delicacy as a dry fly something most anglers are prone to forget. One afternoon I met a friend coining downstream with a broad smile on his face. At first glance it was apparent that here was a citizen with trout in his creel and at peace with the world. I had taken only two trout that day and knew they were extremely hard to entice. So when this angler friend showed me six trout ranging in size from twelve to fourteen inches, I immediately began to ask him about fly patterns, method, and such. "Pattern isn't much," he beamed. "A mighty sparsely dressed fly, you might say." To emphasize his point he held up a number 12 hpok tipped with a small piece of anglewormnothing more. He had about a 10-foot leader tapering to a 30-inch, 4X tippet. "Look, Citizen, this leader, tapering to a 4X tippet this worm those six trout! Would you mind making the connection?" "Why surely," he grinned smugly. "Just cast upstream, like you misguided fly fishermen do when using a nymph. This light tippet makes that worm very water-willed. It goes down through the nat ural feeding channels where those trout are waiting on these inactive days. Well, when anything as attractive as a worm is dangled under their indifferent noses, they strike. So it is just a matter of getting there with the proper offering and a fine piece of gut. Then let Nature take its course." His insisting on fine gut brings up an interesting point on leader materials nylon and natural gut. Both have many good qualities to recommend them; both have disadvantages. One advantage of nylon is that it requires no soaking before use, while natural gut, as you know, requires a thorough soaking before it can be tied or used. For wet fly fishing on big water, or for drifting a worm deep, as my friend with the beautiful creel of trout did, gut is superior to nylon. It will sink more readily. Another advantage is that for equal breaking strength it is slightly smaller in diameter than conventional nylon. There is one type of leader material, however, marketed under the trade name of Platyl, which is very small in diameter for its breaking strength. Its calibration per pound is less than natural gut In streams where the water is seldom more than wader deep, nylon serves very well for wet fly fishing. Bass and trout will usually move out sufficiently in such shallow water to take a fly, even though it is not deeply fished. The only exception is when they are inactive, and the fly must be offered directly at their hideouts under the deep cut banks, sunken logs, and ledges. Then, natural gut is the best choice. Anglers eventually decide to make their own leaders. There are several reasons for this, the most important of which is that home made leaders can be designed with certain local water conditions in mind. And, of course, there is always plenty of time during long winter evenings, after the angling seasons are closed, when a fisher man enjoys doing something about his projected trips for the coming season. Making leaders is a natural for such times. And it is compara tively simple, once a few leader-making knots are mastered. Almost any fishing tackle catalog has illustrations of proper knots to use in tying leaders, so they will not be gone into here. I have only one suggestion: use ordinary string until you have mastered the knots most commonly employed. Being larger, the intricacy of the knot is more readily apparent than it would be if you first attempt it with the finer nylon or natural gut. Making your own leaders will give you a very good grasp of the importance of this part of your terminal tackle, and that alone is reward enough for many evenings* work.
|
