Adding Weight (9 of 14)

When you're faced with a deeper run and you're fishing smaller flies like we are today, you need some weight on your leader. Nobody likes to put weight on the leader, it makes casting tougher and you get hung up more often, but sometimes you've got to do it to get your fly down to the fish. So, what I'm going to do now is put on one shot. You try to start with as little weight as possible, and then you add the lightest weight first, and then you add weight to the leader until you're ticking bottom every half a dozen casts or so. Your fly's got to be occasionally ticking bottom, or you're just not fishing deep enough. The thing you want to do, you don't want to try to put these on with your teeth because their hard, you need a pair of forceps. And I've got a knot above my first fly. It's about a foot above my first fly, and I'm going to attach the shot right above that knot. Shot tends to slide on your leader, so you really want to put it above a knot. Rigging a nymph with weight is not an exact science. So, experiment with various arrangements until you catch fish. It's really satisfying when you figure it out.