Leaders and Tippet Material

The Tie That Binds

Charles Cotton, in the Compleat Angler, talks about using two stallion tail hairs for fly leaders. I did some snooping around. Horse tail hair is, on the average, about .19mm and a tensile strength before it starts stretching of around 100 MPa (Yes people actually research this stuff, and in that study they found human hair is actually stronger though finer). That equates to about 0.0074” or about 3.5X and a strength of about 0.63lbs. So two of them are actually around a 3/0 tippet. Later on leaders started being made of silkworm gut. The standard silkworm gut was sold with a diameter of about 0.011.” It would then be drawn through a series of dies, each one reducing its diameter by 1 mil. So 1X material had been drawn 1 time through a die and had a diameter of 0.01 inches, 2X was reduced by 2 mil and became 0.009 and so on. That concept has held. In terms of actual impact on properties of leaders that method leads to all sorts of confusion, but more of that later. Silkworm gut came in a variety of colors, but it was mostly an opaque color ranging from a sort of ivory/beige to grays and browns.

When I was a young lad, we would spend the summers up in the mountains in an area where every little trickle held trout. My Grandfather owned a cabin up there and the various and sundry aunts, uncles and cousins would cycle through, but we spent the summer. My first fly rod was a Shakespeare Wonder Rod that was this white thing I guess somewhere around 7 ft long. My Dad had tied about 20 feet of fly line to the end reel seat (I had no reel) and a length of some sort of tippet was hung to the end. My Dad used to smoke a pipe and I carried a spool of tippet material and a bunch of flies and some shot in an old tobacco can. I think that tippet material was probably 4X or so.

I bring all this up to point out that until very recently everyone caught trout without much regard to tippet color and used, what today would be considered, rope. And they got away with it because I think the basic mechanisms of trout feeding preclude much by way of tippet shyness. I have a couple of past articles on trout vision, one that has to do with surface visibility and the other with general visual acuity. I’m presenting them again as reference material.

A Trout's View of the Surface

Trout Visual Acuity

Dry Fly Leaders

The basic gist of the two of them combined is that trout have limited vision of rather low quality. When looking up at the surface a trout has a field of view that is 1.13x the trout’s depth below the surface. So a fish lying 2 feet below the surface only sees about 2ft 3 inches out from where it’s lying. If you were to cast a dry fly in line with this trout, any part of your tippet more than about 3 feet away is just not visible to the fish. It just isn’t. So people fishing 4, 5 and 6 ft tippets to keep their leaders away from tippet shy fish are just fooling themselves.

The visual acuity of a trout’s eye is about 1/14th that of a human’s with 20/20 vision. So however well you can see the tippet at 28 feet with your eyes corrected to 20/20 is what the trout sees at 2 feet. And if they can see the tippet they sure can see the hook hanging below the fly and the eye of the hook it’s tied to.

So is there a reason for a longer and lighter tippet? Yes there is, but visibility isn’t the reason. For surface fishing longer and lighter tippets allow you to throw some slack into the tippet, forestalling drag. If you can’t figure out how to do it yourself, rely on an even longer tippet not allowing the leader to straighten out and so throwing slack in there. This is the same story as slow fly rods, trying to use incorrect tackle characteristics to make up for lack of skill. Learn how to do it right and you will catch a lot more fish. I think you always find the long leader crowd is also the non-catching crowd, because while the long leader may drop in the slack it takes away from accurate casting and efficient hook setting. I know this is an article on tippet materials and leaders but I’ll take a side trip on a couple of casting hints. There are 3 basic ways to thrown slack into cast with a dry fly. If you can do it cast angling your cast upwards a bit and let it slide backwards as it settles to the water.

The second way is to wiggle the rod a bit and through some slack into the leader. Once cast, unless you move it off track the fly is going to where you sent it. If, however, you cast a little high you can wiggle the rod tip and throw some slack into the tippet as the fly descends to the water. Of course this is tricky whe it’s windy so go with the technique shown above, or the last one I’ll show below.

Shamelessly stolen, albeit with gratitude, from Epic Rods.

The last technique actually involves manipulating the fly and leader on the water and requires fishing downstream to the fish. Cast your fly a little bit above the trout’s picture window. You can also move it to the side if you like. Now gently lift your rod tip an drag the fly towards yourself. Then drop the rod tip depositing the line and leader in a series of slack curves and let them slide down to the fish.

As you go along you’ll develop your own tricks for throwing slack into the leader under all sorts of conditions. A long leader is never the right answer. In fact an overly long leader is always the wrong answer.

So my tippet section to my first dry fly (yes I often fish two dry flies on my leader) is invariably 3 ft or less and the section between the first and second flies can vary between 1 and 2 feet depending on how I want to fish them.

Let’s talk a bit about tippet size for dry flies. As I got a better grip on what I was doing and graduated up from the tobacco can, the rule of thumb I was taught was to divide the size of the fly into 4 and that was the tippet size to use. So a size 12-14 would be 3X, 16-18 would be 4X and so on. Somewhere along the way I decided that for dries a divide into 3 made more sense. 10-12 to 4X, 14-16 to 5X, 18-20 to 6x and so on, but there never really was a reason to go below 6X unless we were way down into the size 24 type flies. The only thing finer tippet material buys you is more headaches, less control and general pains in the hind quarters. Learn to cast some slack into your leader and the rest will go away. The same thing applies to leader length. I’m not sure what extra leader length buys you. Obviously small streams mandate short leaders. You need fly line for control, so streams like these are best fished with leaders between 6 and 7.5 ft.

The key to getting a leader that turns over nicely is matching the butt section of the leader to the tip of your fly line. Then you need a gentle taper down to the level tippet. In no way am I suggesting you tie your own leaders. God knows life is too short for that sort of rigor when perfectly good leaders are available commercially. But do pay attention to the butt sections of your leaders. When they’re short, as in fishing these small streams, you run into an issue with the butt sections often being too heavy, or the taper too sharp. If you’re fishing a heavier line weight like a 5 there probably is no good solution. A 4 is a little better and a 3 even better so. Now buy yourself a 7.5 ft leader for a light tippet, say 5-6X.

Orvis SuperStrong Leader Specifications

Now you can trim off the front level tippet section and tie on your tippet. If you are fishing a heavier line and can’t find a suitably thick butt section tie on a level piece of monofilament and then the leader. Some people reading this piece may notice the mention of the butt section diameter on the leader specifications for the first time. I believe it’s as important as the tip section. Every once in a while Orvis, where the above chart is from, does get it right. So do others. I wouldn’t buy a leader from a company that didn’t think it was worth mentioning the size of the butt section. It would seem they don’t know their butt sections from a hole in the ground. Once you have the leader matched at the butt you can trim the tippet off until you’r back to a thickness where you can tie your own tippet on. I find that a 1 size skip works fine. So if you want a 5X tippet you’re okay if you trim the leader back to where it is 3 or 4X thick. More than that and it will tend to hinge. None of this is exact. You don’t need to carry micrometers and tippet gauges and all that sort of stuff. If you must, feel a piece of the appropriate thickness on your spool, or just go by touch. If the leader hinges, address the situation. If not keep on keeping on.

Larger rivers mandate slightly heavier lines. So make an appropriate adjustments. You’re not likely to fish this river with a 3 wt. A hefty 4wt might be fine, but when the mountain winds start blowing a 5 or sometimes even a 6wt would be better.

Now, of course you need a heavier butt section, and the taper down to 4 or 5X would need to be longer mandating a 9 or possibly even a 10 ft leader. None of that has anything to do with catching fish - they can’t see your leader. It all has to do with the ability to manage presentation of your fly.

A gratuitous trout picture, since it’s good to look at pretty fish from time to time, then we’ll move on to leaders for nymphing.

Nymphing Leaders

Things change once we’re looking at nymphing leaders. The first thing that governs the length of the leader is how far down you need to get your fly.

The South Holston is hydroelectric tailwater with a peculiar topography and hence hydrology. The river bed strecthes from shore to shore without much of a shelf. All that happens when the turbines start blowing is that the water level rises, several feet, and starts moving a lot faster. At low flows this section of river is probably flowing at 100 cfs

But there are pools and potholes ranging from 2 to 6 feet deep. When the flow rises to 2,000 cfs or more the water may rise a couple of feet across the entire river and the flow kicks up a lot.

But since the fish don’t have shelves to climb up onto, they stay hunkered in the deep pools and potholes. But now those have depths of 5-10 ft with a rollicking current. The insect life on the South Holston is almost dormant at low water. The high water though kicks everything to life and the nymphs start drifting prior to the daily hatch of yellow or olive mayflies that runs almost year around. In the grass beds the scuds get active and some inevitably get kicked loose into the current. The fish also start feeding. But, until the fish start rising, this is the world of deep water nymphing. No 7-10 ft leader is going to cut it here. The locals fish a thing they call the bottom bounce rig. A more Godforsaken thing pretending to be fly fishing is hard to find. I tend to use what I call a maggot rig (look at the link below to get a description of one).

But, of course, now given that we need to reach down 6-10 ft, the leader must perforce be longer than the dry fly one. But one special criterion kicks in. You have to sink the whole bloody mess and keep it drifting at the speed of the bottom whicle the top tries to swing right on by. In order to do so, you need the sinking part of the leader to offer as little water resistance as possible. Water drag is the force with which the water drags on a body. This is mostly a matter of the shape of the body. Yes, different surface finishes can change the amount of drag, but in the case of fishing line, it’s just the thickness of the line. But it’s like the square of the thickness. That means that if you were to compare the drag on 4X tippet to a 5X tippet, the drag on the 5X would be 27% lower than the 4X tippet. That’s a meaningful amount. So the finest tippet material you can get away with, the better off you are while nymphing. All you have to watch out for is that the finer you make it the harder it becomes for you to cast a really long line. Though sometimes you don’t have much of a choice. It may be hard to tell in this picture because of the clarity but that fish was sitting in about 8ft of water.

In a spot where the current actually moves right on along.

I normally hope the fish are rising there, because I hate throwing the 10 to 11 feet of tippet required to nymph it. Fortunately the “maggot rig” makes it at least halfway bearable.

Leaders meant for nymphing deeper and/or faster water require a bit of design and also a change in casting style. you need the fly to sink down to where the fish are. That’s either a long way (deep) or the surface moved the rest of you leader along fast as the fly tries to sink. The easiest way to let this happen is to make a few stack mends starting as soon as the fly touches the water and starts sinking. Stack mends allow you to keep the rest of your terminal gear at about the same location as the fly sinks. Here’s a video about it.

There are a few tricks to the technique that have to do with your leader. If your butt section is too short and heavy, you are liable to pull the indicator up and lift the tippet, which doesn’t help. If you don’t fish an indicator, and I sometimes don’t because it isn’t the best you don’t have a natural anchor. In either case the leader section before the tippet must bleed off enough energy to not lift your leader when you stack mend. You could end up with an extremely long leader depending on how deep you’re fishing.

I do a lot of fishing from a drift boat. Next to fishing dry flies, one of my favorite ways to fish is nymphing fast moving flats that are full of potholes. You can find that sort of water on most of my favorite trout rivers.

The Roaring Fork

Or this beauty in Eastern Tennessee, the Watauga

These sections of river look relatively featureless but under the water they are a hive of troughs and potholes and divots ranging from wash basin size to many yards long. You can fish them with nymphs the same way you would fish them with a dry fly. Drop your fly in a likely looking spot and keep it drifting potshoting every little underwater feature. But what you need to do is drop your fly into that extra depth of each little feature. the way I do it is cast downstream and a little across and let the flies drift towards a target, as the approach the target you give it a gentle stack mend or two and voila, your fly sinks don into the target. once your about to get out of the hole lift the rod tip and lift the fly off the rim of the hole, then let it drift along to the next one, or ock up and cast to the next one, rinse, repeat. You can’t really play this game with a strike indicator, they keep yu from sinking your fly at the right moment. So you need a nymph leader you can actually cast, and mend, and stack mend. I build this leader very much like I build a dry dropper leader. Tie the upper section like a dry fly leader though with a slightly stouter end. My nymph leaders end in 3X and my dry dropper leaders in 3or 4X depending on the size of the dry. Now drop your nymphs down on 5X tippet. A couple, or three beahd head flies will get down in a hurry.

The key to casting all nymph leaders is to open your loop, up slightly. That will drop the lower part of the loop and the rod tip below the business end of the leader.

Tippet Material

Tippet material comes in a plethora of brands most of which are branded with some sort of superlative - Absolute, Super, Power, etc. It’s also an area in which manufacturers lie and cheat like there was no tomorrow. Many a brand’s 5X has an advertised strength of everyone else’s 4X but an unadvertised thickness of everyone else’s 3X. Even batches from the same vendor show massive amounts of variability. I always buy my tippet material at the local fly shop (in fact I try and buy everything at the local fly shop. Having run one, I can relate to these folk trying to make a living in a very tough environment.) That let’s me feel the material and get to what I want. The minor differences in breaking strength are immaterial. Ever tried to break 5X tippet when the fly was 10 feet up in a tree? See? A normal trout gets to be 5 lbs at about 24”. Not many people have caught a 5 lb trout. The strength the fish can pull is much less. The breaking strength of your tippet isn’t the problem.

The issue with tippet material breaking either has to do with it’s condition or the knot. There’s all sorts of stuff written about how to tie your knot. I’m not going to add to the pile. If you haven’t gotten there yet, well……….. The second big issue is material deterioration due to heat. It doesn’t take a lot. Especially some of the new materials where they build up strength by impregnating the material with some sort of resin. Heat makes the impregnating material leach out and the tippet material loses strength and integrity. One surefire indication is when your material starts pig tailing on you. The mere act of tying the knot puts all sorts of curly cues into it. If you catch a fish, the pull on the material makes it twist and turn once the pressure is removed. That material is now shot. Summer heat makes that happen rather rapidly. If fishing on a boat, throw your spools into the guides cooler. If wade fishing put them somewhere cooler. I normally have mine on a long lanyard and tuck the business end into a vest pocket that also has a frozen bottle of water. Two birds, one stone.

Now, very briefly, let’s touch on the great flourocarbon argument. This supposed invisible, unbreakable, sinking wonder that costs 3 times what anything else does.

There was a reason I started this article with pictures of leaders in various shades of ivory, gray and brown with nary an invisible one in sight. At certain times of the year I like swinging tube flies for fish, whether they be anadromous fish, or bigger browns in big or small water. Sometimes I do it with single handed rods and sometime I do it with two handed rods. But in all cases I fish some sort of sinking tip to get, and keep, the fly down as it swings. This means a short leader leading to a dark brown, grey or black sinking head.

There’s about 2 ft between the MOW Tip and first fly (look for the loop attaching the leader to the sinking tip). The fish don’t care. This guy didn’t on a similar rig

Nor did this guy

Not only did they not care about the great big slug of dark colored sinking tip sitting two feet away from the fly, but their buddies didn’t care about the hook hanging below the fly, or the knot in the eye of the hook, in each and every instance in which they ate a fly. They don’t care because they don’t have the eye sight that allows them to care.

But let’s go ahead and look at this visibility argument. Visibility under water is due to a combination of factors. The first, as anywhere else is the ability of an article, any article to reflect light. That’s how you see color. So if a material reflects light it becomes visible. However these materials become difficult to see if the light they reflect is the same as their surroundings. That’s essentially camouflage. So one claim you’ll see made is that flourocarbon is less reflective. Baloney

There’re 3 brands of tippet material of the same professed thickness. One is a flourocarbon. You tell me.

And now you can see which one is the flourocarbon. The next issue is contrast against the surroundings. There is an outline contrast, defined by the reflection, that’s the same for both types of material. There’s a coloration contrast and that’s about the same. The last is this stuff about the refractive index. The claim is that the flourocarbon has a value closer to water so refraction won’t be as big an issue. But what water, with what sediments and chemical content?. It all changes the refractive index. More importantly water with sediment or other dissolved components like chalk or silt, would make the refractive index moot. But my biggest argument is that from time immemorial, trout haven’t cared. They still don’t.

Alright, let’s move on to the next argument, flourocarbon is denser so sinks faster. Okay, maybe technically it does, but does it really matter? It has a relative density of around 1.7-1.8. So let’s call it 1.75. Now consider a 5X tippet 1m long. That would have a mass of 0.12 gms for flourocarbon, versus 0.1 gms for nylon monofilament. A single number 8 shot would more than make up the difference, and you don’t have to put up with the poor knotting, high cost or low durability of flourocarbon. And if sink rates really were to drag the fly down, you’d have to carry an entirely different set of leaders and tippet material for fishing dries. Of course that wouldn’t apply to the Euro-nymphing crowd who seem to either be happy not fishing dries or have to carry two rods. I just don’t see the point in spending the money for flourocrabon. If I had to spend 3X the money, I’d buy three times as many spools, changing them out every so often.

Like most other things in fly fishing leaders are as easy or complicated as you want them to be. I don’t like complex, so I buy standard tapered leaders, they work fine, I keep my leaders as short as I can get away with, I use the heaviest tippet material I can get away with, and over the years I have learned how to actually do what needs doing, as opposed to trying to overcome the issue with funky tackle. The straight forward way will catch you a lot more fish, with a lot less pain in the tuchus.

And a July Watauga trout. They do grow them pretty down there.