FLOAT FISHING For Steelhead - IN Depth HOW TO! (Sliding & Fixed Setups)

hey what's up everyone out there thanks so much for tuning in to another addicted fishing video today we're out here on a wet pacific northwest day and we thought you know as we're searching kind of on youtube there's not really a full-on like in-depth float fishing video not even from us so what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to cover everything in one video jordan's gonna go over the sliding float setup and i'm gonna go over a fixed float setup and we're gonna show you how to fish both of those so if you guys have friends or family or anyone out there this is the perfect video to show them to kind of get them introduction into float fishing right exactly we're going to tell you everything from start to finish on how to go out and successfully use either a fixed flow or a slide boat to use any method to catch any kind of steelhead or salmon species out there exactly and it's coming up next so stay tuned [Music] all right so the first method that we're going to go over here today you guys is the slide float method i'm going to set up a half ounce float here but what we want to talk about first and what's probably the most important part of float fishing before you even set up your rod is your rod itself what we like to use is anywhere from eight and a half at least to a ten and a half foot rod my favorite is like this okuma x 99 this is an awesome rod six to twelve pound line rating and i have a 50 pound braid on here with a 3000 series reel both by okuma any rod will work for this again as long as it's a little bit longer and that'll go into how we manage our line which you'll see here in just a minute so what we're going to talk about first is how to actually put the bobber on your line we have a 50 pound braided line here and i like to use anything above a 40 pound 50 60 pound even while i'm float fishing because it floats very well we're almost emulating fly fishing here where you want your line floating up on top of the surface of the water so that you can manage your line and get a good drip what i'm going to do here first i have my half ounce float here my 3 8 ounce float i have a little bee that this comes with and what you're going to see here i have my little bobber stops and they make thread bobber stops but they also make these little rubber stops which i like even more so i'm going to slide my line through that little piece of wire i'm going to pull that up on there that way i got my rubber stop and i got my bead which is going to stop my float from going over my bead so i have a little bit of an extra bead here it's never a bad thing to use two of them or maybe even a large corki so that you can see when that line actually makes it all the way down and through and you can see if your line's tangled while it hits the water so i'm gonna put my second bead on there then i'm gonna take my slide float here i'm gonna run my line straight to the top of it feeding it all the way through it doesn't hurt sometimes to give it a little suck pull that line through there especially if it's wet and there you have it so as you see it already we have our bobber stop we have our two beads and we have our float and now that bobber shop is going to regulate our depth back and forth through this series of fishing so now that we have that i'm going to take just my simple inline float i'm going to add another little bead so that my knot doesn't get messed up by that by that weight or that float going up and down on it so i'm going to add that second or that third little bead right below just like that i'm going to take my inline weight here just do a normal fisherman's knot just a clinch knot connecting my braided line down to my weight itself and what you can also do here what i like to do at other times especially if we have low clear water conditions or situations where you want to have a little bit lighter and less visible presentation than this high vis line is you can tie a mono or a fluorocarbon bumper to the end of your braided line and then run this same setup if you guys want to see more about that check out some of our other addictive tutorials where we go in depth on how to actually tie that bumper on there i even liked you sometimes if you run out of inline wings or you can't find them at your local store i'll do on a normal barrel swivel and put four or five split shots whatever amount of weight that i need and that will help slide that down and get you that perfect amount of weight for cheap or again in a pinch then i'm gonna take about three and a half to four feet of fluorocarbon leader depending on how deep of water that you're gonna run i don't like to go anything shorter than about a foot long leader for this worm setup that i'm gonna be using and again you cannot apply beads to this you can apply any sort of jig you can apply anything to the end of your line but i usually usually always start with about a three to a four foot leader so i'm going to tie that fluorocarbon leader to the other side of my inline weight here like so and we are ready to fish so what i have on here is an eighth ounce addicted worm head with the guarantee worm off the end of that there this is addicted products you can find that on our website addicted.fishing or at most retailers across the country but this is one of my very favorite setups for a steelhead that we're fishing for today all right so quick little overview of our setup here we have our bobber stop again it could be these little rubber stops or they can be thread i have my beads or my corkies that are keeping my bobber from floating over my bobber stop there and going too deep i have my 3 8 ounce inline float you can use anywhere from half three quarters one ounce whatever keeps you down to four feet of fluorocarbon leader this is 15 pound down to my addicted worm so now that we have this method dialed in we're gonna let marlon step in and he's gonna show you an even more effective method of using a fixed float all right everyone so i actually just got done running a spoon rod through here it's a wet wet day out here in the pacific northwest and that's the first thing i kind of want to say about the fixed float before we kind of transition into showing you how to use this it's not the best method to choose if you're fishing a really really big river or you have a lot of flow like the river's really really high i definitely wouldn't go with a fixed flow i would go with what jordan just taught you which is the sliding setup but a fixed float is going to prevail on every other scenario it is going to be the preferred method on small creeks on small streams or even big rivers that might have low flow or low water at the time that's when you're going to want to use a fixed float i already got this thing rigged up here but i'm going to basically untie it for you guys just to show you how this thing works so first off i'm not going to say much about the rod it's going to be pretty much the same as what you would use with what jordan just told you anything from you know eight and a half to ten and a half or even longer is going to be great for float fishing i prefer longer for sure so if you're looking to just get into it definitely buy a longer rod it's going to help you with line control and all that we're going to kind of show you that when we get to the fishing part of this so first things first is i got my braided line here and what i've done is i've attached it using what's called a double uni knot now there's a bunch of different knots out there there's a double uni there's a blood knot there's a crazy alberto there's a million different knots just search on youtube how to attach braid to floral carbon or braid to mono and you're going to find all sorts of videos on how to do that but that's the first thing you're going to want to do to start with this fix float setup so after you've kind of attached your fluoro to the braid this this right here is i'm using 17 pound fluorocarbon today and what i've done is i've basically pulled off about 10 feet and that's usually i usually go anywhere from like 8 to 10 feet but you want to base that off what you're fishing if you think you're going to get to a hole that you need to get out to 15 feet of leader then go ahead and use that if you need to okay so what we mean when we say fixed flow is basically your float is fixed to the line that you're fishing whereas jordan's float like he just showed you it's sliding up and down the line the fixed float is going to be attached using usually a piece of surgical tubing or some o-rings or something like that this is our must mustad addicted fix float the thing that makes this one a little bit better than my in my personal opinion than all the other floats out on the water is you have this weight system and what this weight system allows you to do is dial in where you're fishing what weight of presentation you're fishing so if you want to fish a 16th ounce you can take it down you can add two weights or even add a third weight to make sure that that float is tracking through the water as naturally as possible the other thing is there's a lot of other fixed floats on the market that i see are made out of foam now the difference between foam and balsa is balsa is just a lot more premium material and because it's a wood it's a lot more neutral buoyancy in the water and so it's super sensitive you're gonna you're gonna pick up every little thing that that float does so fixed floats in balsa wood whether you buy our addicted float or you buy another brand of balsa i highly suggest using a balsa float when you're using a fixed float system so our float the way it works is it has a piece of surgical tubing here on the top that you slide off and what you do is you take your leader material here you put that on your you put this piece of surgical tubing onto your leader and then you're going to take the top of the float and you are going to slide that in there just like so and as you can see it's fixed on the line now and again there's a million different floats out there you guys can buy that kind of mimic this same thing so just go to your local sporting goods stores check all the fixed floats out and kind of pick one that you think's the best um same thing we're going to take this bottom piece of surgical tubing here off of there and as you can see we have an o-ring right there in place that's holding our weights onto the bottom of the float so we're going to slide this up just a little bit give ourselves some line and then we're going to take this here and put it onto the leader your second piece of surgical tubing slide it up here and then you're gonna attach that to the bottom stem like so there you go and there you have it folks i like to leave that surgical tubing kind of closer to the bottom of the line and not push it up because i don't want bad angle on that line i want it to kind of be coming right off the bottom of the float like that so as you can see this float is now fixed to the line but the huge benefit of this thing especially when you're fishing smaller water or you're fishing a river where the depths changing a lot is if i want to go deeper i just boom and i slide it up if i want to go shallower boom and i slide it down so it's a really really simple setup and there's not much to it you know jordan had to put a bobber stop and then slide it up and then a tiny bead and then an in-line wait there's just a lot more to that presentation so now what we're gonna do is add to the business end okay so our presentations that we're fishing today we're trying to go a little bit more big a little bit more bright when you're using a fixed float i'll have shawn come in here and if you guys didn't know sean's our cameraman shout out to him he makes these videos possible but what we're gonna do is you can see i got a good selection of jigs a bunch of different colors in there i got some little mini jig heads some little micro worms and then in this box what i have is a whole bunch of different jig heads as you can see i got some metallics i got some blues i got some things like that i am going to go with a jig head and a worm today again like if sean you pan out to the water here and show these guys what it looks like as you guys can see it's a little higher the water is pretty high we got a lot of rain over the last few days and so i'm going to fish a jig head i'm going to go here just with a black jig head this is an eighth ounce actually you know what i think because the water is so high i'm gonna go with a quarter ounce i'm gonna go with a hot pink quarter ounce jig head and this is just one of our mustache ball jigs it's not necessarily one of our worm jigs but it works you know you can use any sort of ball head jig or the flat you know jig heads like we use for our worms they all work great you can find them basically at most sporting goods stores so i'm going to go with a quarter ounce today when you're worm fishing pretty much quarter and eighth ounce is the way to go for sure um i found especially eighth ounce seems to fish really well with the worms i think it just allows that worm to kind of move and do its natural thing in the water so i'm just tying a basic fisherman knot seven eight times back through the loop here i'm gonna wet my fluorocarbon and cinch that thing down i'm gonna cut my tag end off here with my gerber knife because i forgot my gerber scissors and then one thing we want to always make sure we do is get that tag in and just kind of put it in a box you know throw it in the garbage don't leave it on the river definitely not what you want to do all right so we got that in there and as i said in the beginning of this video when i started filming this the reason i love a fixed float setup is because of the simplicity of it you have your rod your reel your braided line your floral carbon to your fixed float to what you're gonna fish and and again you can fish jigs you can fish worms you can fish beads you can fish bait you can do a lot of different things from a fixed float presentation so now i got this quarter ounce jig head here i am going to go with jordan had the guaranteed worm on there i'm gonna go with the old chrome candy we call this one the chrome candy here as you guys know if you guys are subscribers of our channel we love fishing worms especially me i'm obsessed with them and so this is the chrome candy worm it's got a little bit of a translucent pearl white tail and a translucent pink to it and we make these things in six inch we make the worms in six inch because if you're gonna drift fish them or you're gonna bobber dog them or do anything like that a lot of times we'll use a six inch worm but then it allows you to cut it down to any size that you want so i'm just gonna go right behind the collar here and i'm gonna cut this thing down to four inches but if you were fishing a smaller river all you do go here and you can cut it to three you can cut it to two you can just keep going down and making that thing smaller and smaller then you just dispose of that guy throw it in there and pretty much how this works is you just get this worm kind of lined up center of the jig head you're going to slide it up on there like so and you're kind of just guessing at how far you need to go with this worm before you poke it out and there you have it looks pretty damn sexy i think we might get a fish folks all right everyone so now what we're going to do is we're going to show you a good little beatdown video of how good these fix floats can actually work right now [Music] [Music] [Music] all right boys and girls so here we are we're to the piece of water i got my fix float set up jordan's going to also kind of show you right after this how to really work a sliding setup but what i wanted to do is just talk a little bit about the fix setup and tell you what is most important when you're using this thing so when you have your fix float you basically have your float directly to your jig so any movement at all that you do on your rod that registers to that float is going to move your bait so the key thing when you're fixed float fishing is to make sure that you're using your motions of your rods and mending your line and taking care of your line management enough to where your presentation is floating down the river flawlessly and looking as natural as possible to a steelhead because envision this here's your worm it's floating down the river and then you mend your line and right as you mend your line it's going in front of a steelhead and he sees the worm like do something weird something that he's never seen before chances are you're not going to trick him as easy as if you were floating it down and it was coming just right by him as natural as possible so when you're fixed float fishing especially i always like and i say this with every type of fishing i start in close and then i work my way out far this run right here that shawn you can pan out it doesn't really have much structure so there's not a lot of boulders there's not a lot of things in it it's just a flat nice walking speed run so these steelhead could be sitting anywhere in here or because the water's high you could just be catching a mover that's going through so again i'm gonna adjust my depth and i always try to start a little shallower especially when you're fixed float fishing you don't want to take your first cast through the hole and have that thing like dragging instantly so i got it set to about three and a half four feet i'm going to take my first cast in close here as soon as it hits the water i put my rod in the air and then i'm going to start just slowly reeling as that float comes to me so as that float comes to me i'm just going to reel and then once it's right out in front of me i'll drop my rod tip and then when i need to i'll flip my bail make my first mend like so and as you can see your men is you pick that line up bring it behind the float and then let that float just naturally go down through there so let me just do it all in one motion so you guys can see it again without me talking because sometimes my brain doesn't function where i can like actually do it and talk to you at the same time so just pay attention to me right here as i do this i'm going to cast up river just a little ways let it hit as it's real as it's cut as the floats coming towards me like it is i'm just reeling i'm reeling reel and reeling up all that slack until i reach my float and then i'm gonna keep letting it go down river naturally and then once it's gone too far i'm gonna flip my bale i'm gonna mend my line and i'm gonna start letting line out and i'll just give my raw just a little bit of a a thing like this just a little bit of an upbringing you know lifting it just a teeny bit to let a little bit of line come off of that reel and then once i've let it go far enough we're gonna reel it up we're gonna run it again and usually what i'll do is i'll run it through the same the same kind of line two or three four times until then i'll step out so again i'm gonna go a little bit less as far up i'm gonna go in really close right here i'm gonna bring it in super close i can see there's a huge boulder right there that a fish potentially could sit behind so i'm gonna run it right through there just like so you can see how that's naturally just floating down the river if i see too much line getting in front of my bobber i'm going to mend again and drop that line back down so i'm so i'm solid to that float letting it float down through praying to the fish gods that my bobber goes under and if again i'm one of those guys that probably sends the bobber a little too far down you don't necessarily want to long line it too far but sometimes it's fun to do that all right no fish no fish on that one so again after you've run you're in close you're going to just basically repeat that same thing except this time what i'm going to do i know as i start to step out into the water it gets a little deeper so i'm just going to adjust it five six inches and then i'm going to cast just a little farther out and i'm going to run that same line again and do this exact same thing as my float's coming towards me i'm reeling up the slack mending the line to the float you always want to try to keep that line behind your float as much as possible because if not it's going to get in front of your float and then it's going to drag your float down the river and it's not going to look oh what was that we just had a little dibber we had a little bit of a something there something weird happened folks i don't know what it was okay nothing on that one as you get farther and farther and farther out out into the water column it's going to keep getting increasingly harder and it's going to be really important that you have a lot of control with your rod and a lot of control with your line so we're going to make a pretty far cast out there the first thing i always do is just get that rod up in the air keep that line off of the water the best you can same thing you're reeling it to the float letting that thing go down i'm gonna mend just like so it's looking good flip my bail i kind of will put my finger right here i'll mend drop it back down let off my finger and then i use this index finger to stop the line boom okay stopped it gone far enough click it over reel it back in now what we're gonna do is we're gonna try a really hard cast we're gonna try to get it i can see on this other side of the bank that we got a nice a really nice seam over there that's that's moving pretty slow so i'm gonna try to get my float all the way the heck over there this is another advantage to these fixed floats that we have for mustad that we designed they cast really far a lot of the other fixed floats on the market are made out of foam or they're too light and they don't have the weight needed to get where you want to be so watch how far i can fling this addicted float all the way to the other side of the river and then again as that float gets there you're gonna you're gonna get that thing get keep that line off the water as best as possible and you're just gonna keep mending and trying to keep it as natural as possible when you start getting farther out in the river it starts getting challenging but with more and more practice and more time on the river you can get good at it all right everyone i hope that teaches you a little bit more about fixed float fishing i'm going to have some other videos in the description below that we go into more detail about floats and jigs and floats and bait and just a ton of different float fishing videos i'm gonna put all the links in the description so you guys can just get all educated and you can tell your family and your friends exactly how to get out here and do this and have some fun coming up next jordan's going to show you a little bit more of the technique when it comes to sliding float so follow sean let's go join him so the first thing i want to talk about and why we're going to be using slide floats more commonly in a situation like this one is because of the depth of the run two is because of the speed a lot of times you'll find with a fixed float like marlin showed you it's better on the river's edges and corners and in flatter shallower water where you don't need to be going past a certain depth today you see these royals you see these boils you see all this fast current that's gonna keep a fixed float system from effectively getting down in the strike zone where with the slide flip system we're able to adjust the depth perfectly use this counter weight that we have on here to use to control our depth and get down in that strike zone given tough conditions like this here so as i've stepped up to this run i can see in front of me there's tons of room for steelhead to be this is a perfect steelhead run we have it three to six feet deep walking speed all the way through with a nice gradual tail out down through a rapid so what we're thinking are these fish are going to come up through this rapid here they're going to swim up and immediately take this inside line or that far line to relax and gain energy to continue their way back up the river so the way i'm gonna break down a run like this with a sliding float is start shallow and work my way deep while continually casting a little bit further with every cast so as i can tell here i can see the rocks under the water a great pair of smith polarized glasses definitely help to actually be able to see the bottom of the river and cut that glare off even on a dark day like this but the first thing that i'm gonna do here is i'm gonna start at about four feet just my leader and i'm gonna fish this inside close middle far is what i preach in almost every tutorial that we have on addictive fishing when it comes to steelhead fishing what i want you to do is identify the first place in the hole that you can't see the bottom when you step up to the run and cast there so in this case it's only about 10 15 feet off the bank i'm using just my leader as depth and i'm going to fish that inside seam first so i'm going to let that go all the way down to the end of the tail out covering every bit of water that it can on that line waiting for that bobber to ultimately go down okay and so now how i can tell that i wasn't hitting bottom and that i got a proper drift through that run is the level that my bobber is sitting at so you could tell the whole time my bobber was straight up and down it wasn't getting affected by any current it was sitting straight up and down and going exactly with the speed of that current so that being the case i know i wasn't on bottom i wasn't too deep i'm going to adjust my new increments i'm going to go about four inches and i'm going to see if i hit bottom as i go through that exact same line so i'm making two casts at the same line adjusting my depth very minuscule once again i can tell i'm not hitting bottom and you can see the importance of my line management i have my rod tip about 45 degrees up and over the water not laying flat pointing at my bobber but up off the water keeping about half the line that i'm fishing up and off that water so that i can continue getting that same current line all the way through the run and i don't get pulled out or create any sort of drag on my presentation as it goes down through the run so they're at the end i'm just starting to hit bottom and i'm going to bring her back in next thing i'm going to do on my third cast i'm going to keep my depth the same i'm going to cast about 10 feet farther out into the run all right now that i've made my third cast and i went a little bit further out i'm gonna change depth go about another four to five inches deeper and i'm gonna make the exact same cast i made on my third cast there only another about 15 or 20 feet out into the run and again mathematically breaking down the hole and using that system of close middle far close middle far will make you a much more successful angler because you're actually covering an entire hole and i can see now that i've gone a little bit deeper my bobber starting to tilt down river a little bit which is showing me that i'm hitting bottom isn't a bad thing i'm going to go ahead and let it ride because i'm not sagging and i'm going to let that finish all the way out to the end of that tail out there okay fifth cast into the same run now i'm going to add about another 10 feet to my cast keeping my same depth that i had just gone to and slowly fishing this thing down into the middle of the run before we get to this next part guys here's a quick beat down series of how well these slide floats actually work [Music] [Music] [Music] okay everybody so now that we've covered the main basics on how to set it up how to calculate and how to effectively fish a hole i want to cover a couple of things about a lot of the questions that i get asked by all levels of fishermen and especially when they're starting to float fish and they're just learning they always ask how do i know when i'm on bottom how do i know how to set the right depth there's three easy ways of figuring that out that a lot of people don't think of but it's very very simple once you can gain the knowledge of it so what i'm going to do here i've already gone over a lot of what i'm about to say but i'm going to go over the strategy and the method that i'm going to use to try to calculate the bottom of a run that i've never fished before a lot of it too is having the right weight calculated with the right size of bobber if you're not using the same weight as you have bobber or more than that and overloading that bobber a little bit you're never going to be able to see the sensitivity of the bobber and be able to detect bottom so what i'm going to do here just to show you guys and for example i'm going to start my bobber stop right on the top of the bobber there i'm going to go as shallow as i can and i'm going to fish there's three ways to identify whether you're fishing correctly whether your bomber is pointing upriver whether it's pointing straight up and down and whether it's pointing down river and what deciphers all those is whether one you're too shallow one you're perfect depth and two you're too deep so what i'll show you here i'm gonna cast in right beside me here and i want i want the camera to zoom up right on this bobber here and you're going to see as this goes through here how my bobber will eventually start getting pulled and pointing up river you can see that right there it has that slight tilt up river that's what that's showing me is that the current is so strong that it's carrying my my lure or my worm or whatever i have under there my jig too quickly and it's keeping it above the bottom of the river and because of that it's keeping my bobber pointed upriver as my line is getting drug downriver so that's a very easy way to tell that you are too shallow or or two you don't have enough weight so if your bomber's pointing up river you know you need to go heavier you need to go deeper okay so now i'm going to go a little bit deeper through here and we're going to see i'm only going to go about a foot i'm going to add about a foot of line there and i'm going to make the exact same cast and this should be about the perfect depth here i know it's about five feet at five or six feet deep out here in front of me so i have about five and a half six feet of leader line from my jig all the way to my bobber and i'm using my jig as a reference of bottom as well i'm counting my line on my leader which is very important if it's six feet deep you don't want to set your bobber strap to six feet you want to set your bobber stop to three and use the four feet of your leader to get you at six at five feet and be fishing within that strike zone a foot to two feet off the bottom so i added in about a foot i'm gonna cast out into the same spot and you guys are gonna see here how my bobber will perfectly the entire time through this float you see that it's sitting perfectly straight up and down it's not pointing up river it's not pointing down river it's sitting perfectly straight up and down as i mend my line creating my drift to let it go the same speed as the current you don't want to be holding back against it to point it at you you want it to be going straight up and down no belly below you don't want a belly below that bobber creating that drag and pulling you faster through the strike zone that was straight up and down and perfect the whole way through there so now my third cast i'm going to show you how you know you're too deep i'm gonna add about another foot and a half or so to where i know i'm gonna be hitting bottom in this run and i'm gonna cast out there and show you exactly what a bobber looks like when it is too deep so same spot i'm gonna let that sink down and i want you to instantly notice here i don't even have the full you can tell there's not the full amount of weight on my bobber there and it's almost pointing up river as well because i'm hitting bottom so hard it's taking the weight off of that jig so you see as i start to go through here it starts to point downriver i'm getting that slow lean down river you can see it's starting to point starting to point and what that's signifying is that i'm hitting bottom it's pointing down towards the tail out of the run and it's actually showing me that i'm hitting bottom and bouncing up and down there and that's the easiest reference to have when you're trying to find the bottom again three tips for you guys if it's pointing up river you're too shallow if it's straight up and down you're perfect if it points down the river at all you're too deep so use that to help you identify the depth of the runs and to learn different fishing holes to make you more effective at fishing so there you have it folks hopefully that helps you get out on the water and hopefully you can take this video and you can show some of your friends show some of your family share this out there for us and help it kind of get people into this float fishing game because it's pretty effective it can be really effective it'll change your style of fishing and it'll create more and more opportunity for you and all different kinds of water all over the world absolutely so thanks again for tuning in everyone we appreciate it don't forget smash the thumbs up for us if you guys want to see more of our content click this video right here and to all of our subscribers out there we appreciate every single one of you here's today's comment of the day we'll see you on the river

Channel: Addicted Fishing

Views: 280,643

Keywords: float fishing for steelhead, float fishing, steelhead, float fishing for trout, trout, steelhead fishing, trout fishing, how to float fish for steelhead, fishing, river fishing, addicted fishing, steelhead fishing tips, float fishing steelhead, steelhead trout, winter steelhead fishing, summer steelhead, summer steelhead fishing, rainbow trout fishing, how to catch trout, fishing for steelhead, fishing for trout, how to catch steelhead, fishing tips, steelhead float fishing

Id: kTdAl6ZDnvM

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020