15. How To Lead The Flies With The Rod Tip (15 of 20)

- [Tom] One of the fine points I didn't catch on to right away is that in order to stay in tight control of the flies at all times, you need to lead the downstream progress of the flies with your rod tip. Otherwise, you'll develop slack and won't detect strikes. - [George] I mean, start low. You're starting way too high. Low, pitch it up. There you go. Now you need to strip in line, quick strip, now lead, just like lead, quick downstream reach, there you go. - Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't realize you needed to be ahead of it that much. - Yup, absolutely. Now you're in the ball game. - And in deep water, you need to develop some slack first. So at times, a lower rod tip earlier in the drift can help. George, what am I doing wrong here? It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like I'm always getting down and... - The one thing I would just change, it's nothing wrong, but we just need to switch based on the conditions... You see how when you're making the cast, you're immediately pulling back on the rod? You're creating tension. We got deep water, dirty water, fish are on the bottom. So we need basically a sacrificial period of time to get our flies down a little sooner up there rather than here. So when you cast, don't immediately lift up with the rod tip, but instead, just make the cast, but then just point the rod tip towards the sighter, and actually hold the rod tip and draw in the line with the line hand. You know, let that sighter drop a little bit, and then you can engage with the rod tip moving downstream. - Okay, so... Point, just draw on a little bit of line, now elevate, now we're ticking bottom a little sooner, a little higher up. And we have control from the very start to the bottom. - Oh, okay. So... - Fall in line. Good. Now you can elevate. Now see how we're getting in bottom so much earlier? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yup. So we're just creating a little bit of manageable slack earlier on to give our flies time to hit the bottom.