Fly fishing, at its core, is simple. You’re supposed to put a fly in front of a fish, and make it look real. But anglers, being the tightly-wound bunch that we are, have gone ahead and prescribed all sorts of rules and unwritten laws governing how you should fish. A fly cast should look pretty and tightly-looped; much to the chagrin of casting instructors, however, a middling cast will still catch trout.
A drag-free drift should be the goal with your dry flies, until you realize caddis skitter and skate across the water, and hoppers twitch and thrash while trying not to drown.
The way I figure it, real life has enough regulations as-is. Why add more where they’re not needed? And one place where you can greatly simplify things is in your leader and tippet selection.
Fish Fine and Far Off
There’s an abundance of how-to content in fly fishing geared towards catching big trout from tailwaters and spring creeks. That makes sense, since those are the two hardest environments in which to fool trout, especially on dry flies. But all this fussing about tippet size goes out the window when you watch a longtime guide use nothing more than 8-pound Berkley Vanish for his leader and tippet.
One of my good friends has guided the Green River in Utah for the better part of three decades, and he’s the best angler I know. I’ve also never seen him use a tapered leader or spool of tippet. He switches between 8 and 10-pound fluorocarbon, depending on whether he’s fishing dry flies or streamers.
And he’s not the only person I know who approaches tippet and leaders this way. Off the top of my head, I can name five guys I’ve fished with over the past decade who never pay attention to tippet size.
Are they gods, fishing among us mere mortals? Or have they figured something out that the rest of us aren’t privy to?
Well, they’re all vastly better anglers than I am (which isn’t hard), but they’re also excellent at putting flies in front of fish and making them look real. It’s so much more about the drift, presentation, and fly selection than it is whether you used 5x tippet when 6x might have been more appropriate.
Roping Up
Inspired, in part, by these great anglers I know, and my own desire to keep things simple, I’ve made an effort to focus on my presentation and fly selection first, before automatically adding extra tippet, or sizing down, when fish refuse my dry flies. Over the past few years, that’s meant I use 4x tippet and leader more than anything else.
In fact, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve stepped down to 5x this year, and all of them were during the early blue-winged olive hatch on my local tailwater. The rest of the year, I’ve fished 4x almost exclusively.
There are, of course, times when you’ll want to rope up to 3x or 2x. One of my favorite rivers shoves its way through a narrow canyon. All the fish stack in the slack water near the edges, and if they get into the fast current, you’re all but guaranteed to lose your whole rig. Roping up in those instances saves your flies and gives you a fighting chance to land the fish.
Heavier tippet is better for the fish, too, since you can exert more pressure and get them to the net quickly. The quicker the fight ends, the better chance the fish has of surviving catch-and-release.
Two Spools
I still carry one spool of 6x tippet, mostly because it’s half-used and I don’t want to throw it away. But I haven’t broken it out this year, and unless the trico hatch gets out of hand later this month, I probably won’t need to. I reckon I could make it through the rest of the year with nothing more than a spool of 4x and 5x.
There will always be certain fish that call for lighter, finer tackle. But the more I fish, the more I realize those fish are few and far between. Often, those fish aren’t calling for a change in tackle, but a change in how we’re approaching them. Since I’ve focused less on changing tippet and leader sizes, and more on getting a good drift, I’ve noticed an uptick in the amount of picky fish I catch on dry flies.
What this tells me is that I fell back on the crutch of finer, lighter tippet far more often than I should have. And I reckon if I can learn to improve my presentation, anyone else can, too.
I used to feel the same, fishing everywhere and anywhere, until I started fishing my newfound home water in Europe. The old stuff I’d been doing for forty years just didn’t work very well at all. I had to learn to cast 20-foot leaders. I had to learn to throw pile casts. I basically stopped mending, because the fish lived in still buckets and the drifts were no more than six or ten feet most of the time. And I had to start tying my flies onto 6X and 7X tippet, because these fish simply would not eat anything tied on 5X, even if Jesus Christ prepared the presentation. It’s a great big world out there, and people who think they know enough about fly fishing to proclaim that ultralight tippets are unnecessary and useless just haven’t fished long enough. I know, I used to be one of them.