5. Floating lines and poly leaders for streamer fishing (5 of 20)

- [Tom] In order to effectively fish streamers in rivers or lakes, it's important to use the right fly line or at least a modification of your line. If you fish big, deep rivers or those with a heavy flow, you'll need to go beyond your standard floating line, especially because many of these modern streamers use deer hair heads which boy the fly up in the water. And many modern techniques call for using an unweighted or neutrally buoyant fly on a sinking line to be most effective.
The quickest and easiest way to fish a sinking line is to attach a sinking polyleader to your floating fly line. You then just add a 3-foot piece of 2X or 1X tippet to the sinking section to turn your floating line into a sink tip line. So, we've been fishing a bunch of fairly shallow channels this morning, and we're going down into some deeper section of river with some deeper holes.
And I've been using just a floating line with a weighted fly, and that's been fine. We caught some fish. But I'm going to need to get deeper now. And I don't really want to switch lines. So there's, an easy solution is to take a polyleader, sinking polyleader, and put it out on the end of your floating line. So I'm going to rig that up now.
These sinking polyleaders are 7 feet of high-density fly line, so it sinks very quickly. And it's tapered, so it casts like a fly line. So all I'm going to do is loop this onto my floating line, and then at the tippet end, you don't need a tapered leader or anything. All I do is I put a Bimini twist in a piece of 1X, 2X fluorocarbon, and it's just level.
You don't want a tapered leader because you want this thing to stay down low when you're stripping it in. So the Bimini twist gives you a little bit of extra strength at your knot connection, and also gives you a little bit of a taper on your tippet.
- [Blake] You normally streamer fish with a streamer line or with a floating line?
- You know, I usually use a floating line, and I put those polyleaders on if I want to get deeper.
- Yeah, polyleaders are awesome.
- Yeah. They're just...I mean, I don't think I own a sink tip anymore. And if it's really heavy...seldom with trout, but if it's really heavy water, I'll put on a depth charge.
- Yeah.
- Hey! There's a fish.
- [BJ] There he is.
- Ooh.
- Good one too.
- Not a bad one at all. Switching to that sinking line.
- Yup, get it down in front of him.
- Yeah. Yeah, that's a good fish.
- I've noticed sometimes when they get lazy, they'll watch this thing swim over their head, but if they don't swim right in front of their face...
- Ooh, what is he stuck on something?
- No.
- He's just big.
- Just strong. They're just strong. Super strong.
- Oh, that's a nice fish. Wow.
- They stay up. They don't like the world coming down on them.
- Whoa, man.
- Ah!
- Ahh!
- Ahhh! Here, I got...
- Okay. There you go. All right.
- Whoa. Woo!
- Good job. Good job. ♪ [music] ♪