Quick ties

[clm]

Tied a few more mop flies and a bass fly today. I threw a mop fly this morning for about 30 minutes. The fish weren't cooperating at all...but I could definitely see the potential. Hoping for better luck later in the season. I have a lot of varying sizes of lines. Please chime in if you guys have some easy line combinations that work well for building your on leaders/tippets. I have 2 three weight rods and a 5 weight.IMG_20200318_190947~2.jpg

[Mark]

Thanks to guidance from Joe Bruce, I've been tying my own leaders from mono stock.

For pickerel, I use a 7 to 8 foot leader made of 4.5 feet of 50# mono for the butt and 3 to 3.5 feet of 40# mono for the bite tippet. I add a loop to the butt to connect it to the fly line and I connect the bite tippet to the butt with a double surgeon's knot. That leader turns over large heavy streamers with ease and pickerel rarely bite through the 40# mono, although I had one do so in December.

Now, that's way too heavy for your rods and the flies in your photo. For your scenario, I would use a butt of 40# mono 30 inches long. To that I would add 15 inches of 30# mono via the surgeon's knot, and then 15 inches of 20# mono. That creates a tapered butt of 5 feet. For a tippet I would add 3 to 4 feet of 10# mono. You may think the 10 is too heavy for those flies if you're going after bluegills. But remember that big bass often swim with bluegills. Also, that leader will turn over bass poppers.

Commercial tapered leaders are vastly overpriced in my opinion. They can run $5 to $7, not counting tippet spools. They may come in handy for trout anglers who need hair thin tippets to 7X for picky fish. But the warm water fish I chase are not leader shy. Instead of buying commercial leaders, I bought small spools of Berkeley Big Game Mono in 50, 40, 30, 20 and 10#. With those spools I can make a lifetime worth of fly leaders in various configurations as I've described above at pennies per leader.

[clm]

Thank you. I have and use what I've made, but the performance has been a little lacking. I think I've attempted to taper too quickly. I do use the loop method for quickly replacing them when on the water. Gonna have some coffee and tie some knots.

[Mark]

Yes...Some old books about tying trout leaders show an incredible number of leader transitions to make the taper. Plus they commonly used double uni knots to make the connections. It becomes unwieldy if you follow those formulas and expensive to have so many spools of leader material. It's also time consuming to make a single leader with so many segments and tying double unis. Perhaps for trout fishing where you're worried about drag and the visibility of the leader that method is important. I don't know. But I do know the warm water fish don't care. Further, the leaders as I've described above turn over flies as well or better than commercial leaders and with the appropriate tippet length, the fly hits the water softly without a splat.

The only negative I see in them is that when casting them near algae or other fine fibrous vegetation in ponds, the double surgeon's knots may pick up slime where a knotless commercial leader will not. That's not a big problem, more of an annoyance. Usually I shake it off on the backcast.

[clm]

I tied up 5 leaders yesterday morning. I did not have 40#, so I started with 30#, at 30 inches and worked down from there with 20,15 and 10....tied up a practice mop fly in neon yellow, cut the hook off and promptly went out in the front yard to make some casts.....wow, so much better. Eager to get them on the water. Being about to cast more distance with better landings is gonna be great. I also figured out a few minor mistakes I have been doing while casting....pretty good day in all.

[Mark]

I tied up 5 leaders yesterday morning. I did not have 40#, so I started with 30#, at 30 inches and worked down from there with 20,15 and 10....tied up a practice mop fly in neon yellow, cut the hook off and promptly went out in the front yard to make some casts.....wow, so much better. Eager to get them on the water. Being about to cast more distance with better landings is gonna be great. I also figured out a few minor mistakes I have been doing while casting....pretty good day in all.

Good. I also was surprised at how well they turned over flies.

Another thing you can try that I didn't mention is to put a perfection loop on the tapered end of the butt. That way you can attach your chosen tippet with a loop to loop connection. That extends the life of the butt section almost indefinitely because you merely change tippets when necessary, not the entire leader.

[clm]

Great idea...and simple to implement.