How to Set Up Your Fly Fishing Leader and Tippet

this is going to be a follow-up to the previous video in which we set up an entire fly reel and if you remember it we finished by having the line attached to a nail knot and then that nail knot was attached to a perfection loop which we looped to another perfection loop using the loopty-loop knot and what we have here with the clear material would be a tapered leader if you were going to fish this is the kind of leader that you would buy in a packet and of course it would be about nine feet long and typically it would taper down to a fine point which would be indicated on the packet so you might say get a 9 foot 5 X leader and the question I get asked a lot is well where do we go from there what do I do if I want to tie a fly onto my leader or perhaps fish and nip now the answer to that question is pretty straightforward because what you're going to do is you're going to add some what we call tip it to the end of the leader now you see when you first start out you can tie the fly directly to the leader but after a few hours of fishing you're eventually going to have to cut back into the leader itself and because the leader is tapered that means you're eventually going to end up with a thicker bud end there than you really want because again you're trying to fool fish here and the thing to do at that point is to replace the tip end with a thinner bit of material so here we're going to use this is probably 15 pound and we're going to tie eight pound to it the knot we're going to use is called the double surgeon's knot and this is a very good knot for joining two pieces of tippet together the bud into the leader in the tippet itself or perhaps two pieces of tippet if you're actually making a longer taper and the way to do it is very straightforward simply place the two ends facing each other and then pull them so you have about six inches or so of line to work with make an overhand loop knot and what you're going to do is you're going to pass the tip at end which is on the right in the video behind the butt end which is on the left and then you're going to pinch it with your finger so you've got your your tag in sticking out here and then you've got of course the actual tippet that you're going to eventually tie to fly to now with this pinched in your hand you can quickly pass both ends through the loop by pinching and holding and then grabbing with your fingers and drawing it through that's one and then you're going to do the same thing again and just use the pinch point here in your hand to move it around I'm keeping it pinched this entire time I've got it set up a second time and now I'm going to pass it through and then all you have to do to form up the double surgeon's is take this and pull it tight but it's a really good idea when you're making a surgeon's knot to go ahead and wet the knot so we're going to do that a little bit of spit pull it tight and if you don't get it completely set the first time just pull on each end and it'll set up boom got a nice in line not as you can see it makes more or less a straight shot it's not a hundred percent perfect but it's not too bad if it doesn't completely set you may need to use your teeth there we go once your knot is nice and tight you can cut your tag ends you can either use nippers or in this video we're just going to use some tying scissors here cut them off so that they're very close cut both tag ends and there you go you've joined a piece of Tippett to the butt of the leader and you've gotten back a thin section on which to tie on your fly and that's what we're going to do next now my favorite not for tying a fly under the line is probably the Davey knot and you can find out in other parts of this site in order to keep it simple here we're just going to tie a simple clinch knot which is the most basic knot in all of fly-fishing all you have to do to tackle inch knot is take the bud of the line and pass it through the eye of the hook right here like this catch it with your other hand pull it back and then while you hold the fly see I've crimped both ends of this line with my fingers you're going to spin the fly again keeping the butt tight and held in your pinch point you're going to do it five times and count how many times the hook itself goes under so that's two three four five five is a good number because it seems to make the architecture of this not set up well then see we've still got this twist and we're holding the tag and out here you can grab it with your fingers again and being careful not to let it untwist you're going to take the tag in and simply place it through the little loop which is right up here by the eye of the fly it's kind of small so you may have to spread it at times but then you're just going to run that through there run through the loop catch it on the back side with your free hand and then you've got a knot and again with most knots you're going to want to let them a little bit of spit pull it down tight and if you get it right it should set up nice and tight leaving a tag in which you're going to cut off again you might use nippers but here we're going to use tying scissors let's cut my tag end and now my fly is firmly attached to the line back up here got the double surgeon's knot and then of course all the way up the tapered leader now this of course is a dry fly this particular one is a kind of well used Coffman stimulator and with a dry fly you don't need anything else on the line you can simply begin to fish as soon as you get it tied on but let's pretend for a minute that we're going to actually get an imp fishing and just pretend like this is a nymph and it's going to go underneath the water we need to help nymphs get down because even though they might be weighted they don't always have the best movement in the water if you rely on the weight of the nymph itself to hold it down that's why we almost always want to go ahead and use a piece of split shot and use that to help pull the nymph down see what it's going to do is it's going to pull this section right here if it's sort of slack the slack section is going to be pulled down in an even layer by the weight we're about to attach and that way we'll have a little bit of slack between the weight and the fish and that will let the nymph actually float free and look like a good dead drift the way to attach a weight to a line it sounds very simple because you're just going to crimp it on but I found that the best place to do that is above your last knot so if you've tied on tippet and so you've got a foot or two of tippet there this is a good place to pinch the actual split shot on now this particular shot is a non-toxic stuff that's approved for use in parks like Yellowstone it's not the heaviest does the job and of course you can use lead or bismuth or whatever you choose to use most split shot is exactly the same it's got a little split in it twice called split shot and the idea is going to be to keep it pinched in one finger or two fingers of one hand while you run the line in the little slot once you've got the line in the slot right there the easiest way to get it to crimp on there is to just use your teeth all you have to do is bring this to your mouth bite down and boom there it's attached now why do we do it above the knot for the very simple reason that most of the time split shot eventually slides and when it slides like this it will slide down and hit our knot and it can't go any further to the fly so it ends up not sitting there at the eye of the hook messing up the fly as it fishes I really recommend putting the split above these knots because it's a very advantageous way to keep them in place now I know that this is very basic but of course most people who do are going to be watching these videos will be learning this for the first time so we'll go ahead and cover all of the ground rules when you're fishing a nymph and keep in mind this is actually a dry fly we're pretending like it's an imp when you're fishing a nymph it's going to go under the surface of the water the split shot right here is going to help draw it down and make it sink and that's going to keep it at the level you want it to go to but of course the question is how deep do you want it to go how do you control that and moreover if the fish eats how do you see when the fish eats that's where a strike indicator comes in and the strike indicator is really just a euphemism for a bobber bobbers do two things they keep the fly at the level we want to set them at and they also help to show when the fish actually eats the fly because the bobber will stop moving or sometimes actually go under the water now the easiest bobber is to attach to a fly our pulse' floats which are these little sticky foam jobs that work pretty well but unfortunately they have the disadvantage of not wanting to to move and also not going very far so eventually there they're going to waterlog and they're going to fall under the surface and at times you may you may need to change the depth at which your fly is fishing so how do you use an indicator that lets you change positions I'm going to show you this is how to use a balloon indicator so again we've got the fly on this side we're going to go up here here's our split shot and let's pretend like we've set this about five feet from the split shot a good rule of thumb is to set your indicator one-and-a-half times the depth of the water from the indicator okay how do you attach a balloon indicator first you need a balloon here we have a balloon and I'd like these children's water balloons they typically cost less than a penny apiece and for me orange is the absolute most visible color in the in the color spectrum I've tried these over a lot of fish and I don't find them to actually spook fish any worse than your typical indicator so starting with your basic water balloon you're going to barely inflate it and when you've got about a marbles amount of air in there you're going to just do your basic balloon not tying it off in an overhand knot just like you would for a child or child's birthday party all I've done is made a loop around my fingers and then I pulled this through and as I'm pulling the knot out I'm actually drawing it up sometimes it will actually go ahead and rip for you which is nice but that little tag right there can cause the balloon to spin and that's bad because it'll twist up your leader so always use some scissors or your nippers to cut off that little tag end you want this to be as close to the knot as you can get it okay now how to attach it to the leader first of all the line end is going to be on the left-hand side take the leader and make one loop overhand with the fly in behind like this then you're going to draw the line end this is to the left again the line end is going to go through that loop just like this we're just making a half hitch and what I've done is I've created an open loop with basically just a standard overhead knot right there what you can do is as you draw this up it's going to catch the loop itself and it's going to make a slipknot very simple you could size it however you want take the balloon and use the little end that you cut off as an anchor pull that through holding it in place you're going to draw the slipknot up tight and set it and then once it's where you want it you can kind of tighten it up the advantage of this situation is can move the balloon if you need to and the way to do that is to firmly grasp the fly end of the leader and then pull on the balloon and as you can see it will open the knot and a lot of times it will just pop out then to move it you simply draw Tite and you can actually pull that knot right out one more time we make a loop we pass the butt end through the loop draw it up then when we have our slipknot we're going to put the butt into the balloon through the knot holding it tight we're going to draw it closed provided you don't lose it like I just did you'll be able to set it in place and then to move it again you take the fly end hold the fly in and pull on the balloon that should pop right out and then to get rid of that little loop you just pull point and out it goes and that's how you setup an infant indicator system

Channel: Zach Matthews

Views: 405,213

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Id: G_AmyCmU0_w

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 23 2014