Paying my fly fishing dues at Lake Fyans

I have just returned from the Fyans Fly In at Lake Fyans. It seems that I haven’t payed my fly fishing dues yet as I blanked yet again. However, many valuable lessons were learnt.

Mark Gibbs from Gisborne showed us how to polaroid fish the shallows. This was an intriguing technique I thought only worked in Tasmania, well, at least the way he did it. Mark doesn’t fish any other way which sounded a bit extreme. But lo and behold, it works on any lake which has reasonable shallows, say 20 or more metres in width where the water is about one metre deep, relatively clear and you can easily see the trout against the lake bottom. Fyans is perfect for this as much of the shallows are sandy and trout stand out really well. Mark spotted over 30 fish on Friday and caught five. We tried the technique on Saturday but only saw a turtle after three solid hours. Later on that day I found that neither did Mark – he said Saturday was a terrible polaroiding day and he only saw two fish.  This demonstrates lesson two – what works one day may not work the next. Apparently Fyans is best fished in northerly winds if you want to see fish in the shallows. Saturday a southerly moved in and the barometer dropped considerably.

Sunday we met local legend and four time winner of the Fly In, Bob Stapley http://www.araratadvertiser.com.au/story/1885282/bob-stapleys-record-breaking-haul/. His fly fishing technique involved finding fish in deep water on the Saturday. Being clued into the lake and the effect of the low pressure and southerly wind, Bob knew the fish would be out deep. He found the fish with his depth sounder and only after seeing them on screen did he cast his 7 inch per second sinking line in amongst them. He said he starts stripping immediately so the fly follows a curve downward and then upward. His fly looked like a light brown tom jones with black rabbit fur on top. This technique scored him two trout. We spoke with him at length after the competition and I hope to fish with him again. He was one of those guys who could write an encyclopaedia on these waters. I suppose this lesson shows that when there is no surface activity, you need to whack on your DI7 and get that fly down deep. Does this mean you have no hope without a boat in such conditions because you really can’t get that deep from shore? Who knows! Bob also stressed the importance of fibreglass boats over aluminium ones. He said aluminium boats make too much noise as the waves hit them and this scares the fish. He insists fishing from a kayak is also more productive as the smaller shape produces less shadow and the fibreglass body reduce the sounds of waves hitting the hull. I find the size issue hard to believe as the shadow cast by a kayak is still enormous.

If I had my time over, I would have searched around lots of trees down deep (4m) with a fast sinking line and let it get right down there. We never did that. We fished water consistently under 3m deep. I was near the bottom of the patches we were drifting through as I was pulling up the odd bit of weed.

In order to take my fishing to the next level  i.e. catching a lake trout on a public water, I have decided to give up all drinking of alcohol until I catch a 700 gram minimum trout on fly. This, no doubt, will save me a lot of money and improve my health considerably. Plus it will force me out at nights on these sort of trips when the pleasure of an easing ale is unavailable.

There’s probably nothing more boring than watching someone fish when you can’t but for the catatonic among you, I have made this video of the trip. There are a few interviews with some fly fishing celebrities and the results of the competition are shown towards the end.

Spot What The Trout Are Eating - Exactly What They Are Eating

I just came back from a fabulous trip to Lake Toolondo (December 27th-29th). It is probably the best trout lake in Australia at the moment. The trout were biting on mudeyes for most of the weekend. However on the last morning we couldn't get a bite. When we came back to camp we found out why from our neighbours.

We noticed the trees in the lake were covered in hatching dragonflies and damsel flies, probably from their migration the night before. As we stared at these lovely little creatures and noticed them falling into the water we didn't put one and one together. The trout were mainly feeding on the unfortunate dragonflies and damsel flies that slipped back into the lake before their wings had a chance to dry out.

Our neighbour had worked this out and was smart enough to throw a few into the water. This created a berley trail that attracted plenty of feeding fish. The boys put a couple of newly formed dragonflies on their hooks and started hooking fish consistently. The dragonflies sunk on their baited hooks quite easily but if they managed to float they generally caught a trout. Later when they cleaned the fish they noticed old stomach contents of mudeyes and a more recently devoured bunch of dragonflies and damsel flies.

Why didn't we work this out? I think there are a few reasons:

• When something works for two days in a row you just assume its going to work the next day. It's very hard to think about things more dynamically.
• I have rarely seen anyone talk about dragonfly and damsel fly imitations in fly fishing literature. Its always the mudeye that seems to come up in fishing articles and books. Even though we could see a lot of them floating helplessly on the water it just didn't register that the trout were feeding on them.
• Berleying with insects is something I have never heard of but obviously it works!

How To Prepare Carp So They Are Tasty

This video gives a really clear presentation on how to prepare carp so they are tasty. There's some really interesting stuff in here, like immediately icing the live fish and cutting out meat from only certain sections of the fillet. If it was another species, this would be quite wasteful but given carp are a noxious pest that are easy to catch, this is great information!

Would You Wait 2 Hours to Catch a 7 Pound Trout?

My friend Bernard Holbery recently caught this 7 pound brown from the tiny Stevenson River near Marysville.

Bernard texted me the following story...

Walking along the river with a good friend I noticed this fish in a log jam under some mountain ash trees. There was a dun hatch in progress. There was no way I could just cast a fly at it or he would of just logged me. So after 2 hours behind a tree waiting for this fish to enter the pool he came out of the woodwork. In the meantime there where smaller fish up on duns. But when this fish entered all the other fish scattered the fish showing his dominance. After his 4th sipping of the natural of the surface I cast out my steavenson river dun the rest is history. It was a classic moment and my friend thought he would take the photo in black and white mode. A classic day.

Get Up Early and Sleep Through the Afternoon

I recently returned from a trip to Tasmania where four of us fly fished the wonderful Highland Waters. We were very lucky to get accomodation there and I was quite excited to be able to fish a lake that had trophy sized browns and rainbows. The lake has a strict catch and release policy so I thought we would be in for a great four days of fishing.

Nothing could be further from the truth! The fishing was really tough. There were no rises during the day and only a very sedate ten minute rise of sorts about fifteen minutes before it was too dark to see. I didn't get it at all, there were a lot of midges on the water and on the warmer of the two days a ton of other insect life as well. Do the trout wait until the insects sink to eat them? Or are they feasting under the surface. Who knows!

On the third day I lost two big fish whilst wet fly fishing during the day. This scared the crap out of me as when something leaps at your fly after hours of nothing you get the shock of your life. The first fish I lost because of a basic mistake. As I was retrieving the fly I went to cast when there was still 10 feet or so of line out. Bad move - the trout lunged at the fly and I ripped it out of his mouth

Lesson: Don't recast a wet fly until you can see the fly and whether anything is following it.

On the last day I was so depressed that I slept in whilst my mate went out on the local boat and was greeted by heavily feeding fish. He lost two and caught one.

Lesson: Always fish early, even if you are going to have a nap to recover from 9am until 1pm! It is by far the best time of the day to fish. From an hour before dawn until around two hours after dawn fish feed more intensively than at any other time of the day.

Italian Fly Casting Leaders

I recently did a course in Italian Fly Casting. This is the first time I used a leader made by tying together bits of fishing line. The performance of it really blew me away, beautiful layouts with a 5 metre leader!

Long leaders also allow for more control of drag and presentation.

A simple leader recipe is:

Butt 160 - 180 cm of .50 diameter nylon. (25lb Maxima Chameleon)
80 - 90 cm of 0.40 dia nylon (15 lb Maxima Ultra Green is ok)
40 - 45 cm of 0.30 dia (10lb Maxima Ultra Green)
20 -25 cm of 0.20 dia (6lb Maxima Ultra Green)
A small perfection loop on end of leader then tie on the tippet

160-180 Tippet (4lb Maxima Ultra Green)

Total: 460cm - 520cm (15  - 17 ft)


A standard leader from the famous Jim Allen is the Ritz Perfect Precision Parabolic Leader

107cm x 0.45mm
76cm x 0.40mm
15cm x 0.35mm
18cm x 0.30mm
21cm x 0.26mm
60cm x 0.20mm

Total: 297cm (9.7ft or 7.8 feet less tippet)

Lake Eildon Floating Grubs - What Are They?

As a recovering bait angler its so easy to get on the water and start throwing around a few flies and asking why you didn't catch fish later. But its a total waste of time. Its far more efficient to work out what the fish are feeding on and use a fly that represents their food.

I have been frustrated by the hyper intense pre dawn rises that occur on the Howqua arm of Lake Eildon for a the last year. About an hour before dawn, when you can just see, the fish start rising with intenisty. And half an hour later at what the weather bureau calls first light the action slows down dramatically. 

If you are on a boat during this critical thirty minutes you have unlimited fish to cast to. A different fish rise within an easy 30 foot cast of the boat every 30 seconds. Many of them are only roach but I don't care as they are still a challenge to catch.

Until now I though these fish were rising to chironomids. Why? Because that's what every one said they were rising to. But after some very basic observation (look into the water fool!) I now know these fish are rising to grubs. The grubs are a very dark brown and about the length of a maggot. They have six legs and lie in a semi curled up position. They float right on top of the water - no part of them is beneath the surface. What the hell are they? And what fly do you need to represent them? They look like some Czech nymph patterns I have but these are way too chunky and they don't float above the surface.

If you venture out onto the lake mid morning the grubs have disappeared. Did they hatch into something else, become water logged and sink to the bottom or were they all gobbled up by fish?

Bullen Merri - Don't be lazy, use all your weapons

I spent the weekend fishing the iconic Lake Bullen Merri with the Preston Northcote Angling Club. Typically the club fishes the joint twice a year in the winter months. Primarily this is because we get to stay at the headquarters of our sister club, the Camperdown Angling Club, right on the shores of the lake. And a top spot it is too. I feel for the other poor lunatics who bring down their bivouacs and fish the place at night as howling Antarctic winds pour through the place whilst we enjoy the comforts of a heated lodge. Yum.

The fishing was tough this year. The guys trolling the lake only caught small Chinook Salmon that have been heavily stocked over the last year. The fly fisherman (me) didn't know what they were doing because they were using BMS flies instead of buzzers during the evening rise. Club fishing god  Peter "Swampy" Patterson (winner of the freshwater prize over the 2012/13 season) won the competition using power bait off the bank. Now before you say "anyone could do that" I warn you that Swampy has so many subtle bait fishing techniques that you probably wouldn't stand a chance. My fishing partner MadDog (who won biggest fish of the comp.) wanted to kneel down and worship him when the two crossed paths late on Saturday afternoon. Swampy held his pillow case open and our jaws dropped when we saw five giant rainbow trout inside. We had also tried power bait, amongst four other baits, without these results. Although you might put this down to luck, there were four other fisherman within coo-ee of Swampy and none had this sort of action. Considering he does this time and time again, it reminds me that there can be significant expertise in what seem like the most simplistic of fishing techniques.

MadDog taught me the lesson of the weekend. He was spinning the lake shore in the pre dawn light and to maximise his opportunities he decided to bait fish with a worm at the same time. Lucky he did as the fish he caught on that worm won the biggest fish of the comp.

So whenever you are thinking:

"Here's a good idea. Hold on, should I try this technique? Errrrrr perhaps not, it's a bit of effort, I don't want to."

Stop and do the extra work to maximise your catch. It could get you the big one. Unfortunately I didn't get a touch in exactly the same position using a live minnow that was swimming around wildly and yelling "eat me".

PS. Note that in the video I say a few stupid things as most of the time I was a little tipsy. Also I confuse the stocking of Chinook Salmon with Quinnat Salmon in the lake. See the DPI website for details of what actually was put in.

PSS I have been asked what are Swampy's secrets, how does he catch so many fish on bait? Here is what I have observed:

• Swampy uses fresh bait whenever possible. His top baits are gudgeon and wood grubs. Wood grubs are very difficult to find but gudgeon can be caught in a bait trap. Swampy uses a custom home made bait trap, he does not use those little green traps. The trap he has is pretty big (but legal) and he always uses fresh fish for bait i.e. not cat food, which is pretty crap. He caught the most bait over the weekend save for us with our 6m net. However we did not get the big bullheads, he did.
• Compared to all the other traps around the jetty, he caught more bait.
• He also uses power bait in over 20 different falvours. He rotates though these over the course of the day. It's a bit hard to describe how Powerbait is actually put on a hook. I was shown by his grandson and the main principle is too smooth it out until there are no cracks in it at all. Cover as much of the hook as possible, leave just the point exposed. Use hooks with the little barbs up the shank if possible.
• He specified to me that he only casts 20 ft from the bank at the location he was in. The drop off was quite close to the bank here so he would have been in 4-6 metres of water.
• On this trip I think he had 20 types of Powerbait, scrubbies, mudeye, wood grubs, minnows, gudgeon and bullheads.
• Swampy puts in the hours. On this trip he fished from 6am until 5:30pm in two spots not 100m apart. I remember a Murray Cod trip where he fished until 2am. He won that comp with a fish caught around 1am when everyone else was asleep.
• I am not sure how he reacts to bites, I don't know how long he waits to strike. Nor do I know how hard he strikes. More Swampy research is necessary here.
• Swampy uses pretty good gear. He uses 9ft custom mudeye rods most of the time.
• He rarely fishes from a boat and never spins.
• Swampy's motto is, and I quote, "Let the fish come to you". He does not move about much.

Brown Trout from Tullaroop Reservoir

It's getting cold in these parts and that means one thing - lake fishing for trout is back on the agenda. The best shore based lake fishing occurs from early winter until about November when the water gets too warm and the trout stay down deep in the middle of the lake. Winter offers "smelting" trout action. The trout come in to shallow water during the day to devour bait fish and as you walk around the lake you may be lucky and see "bust ups" of bait fish which gives you a great target to cast to.

This month it was off to the trophy trout water Lake Tullaroop. We fished a few spots from midday onwards but it wasn't until the last hour of light that the fish came on the bite. I am not surprised by this, trout stay in deep water for protection until the light fades and then they come closer to shore to look for smelt and gudgeon. However as its get colder we may get some feeding action during daylight hours.

We tried a zillion lures but after Mad Dog caught a 1.1 kg fish on a twenty year old yellow celta style lure I began to suspect that it didn't matter what you were using. The key was to find feeding trout and that wasn't going to happen until the last hour of light. Just as we were ready to go home I saw a fin break the surface in the dimming light and cast right at it. I picked up my first and only fish just under 1 kg on a pink Tassie devil.

The two successful lures were so different from each other I suspect lure "realism" had nothing to do with our success. Plus a local we met caught trout on a lure that looked nothing like either of ours. The trout were pretty much taking anything, the hard part was finding feeing fish.

As we were packing up we talked to a few locals who said the fishing was going to get better over the next few months as the trout start to actively feed on smelt during the day. At these times you can see fish crashing through the water. I am looking forward to this style of fishing and intend to cover a lot of water looking for actively feeding fish rather than chucking lures in random directions and hoping.

Some lessons for today:

• We fished for six hours but the fish didn't come on the bite until the hour before sunset. Not only that I caught my fish about five minutes before we packed up. That's one fish each at about 1kg each (plus two tinny reddies that don't count) caught in the last hour of the day. You just can't give up when you are trout fishing and you have to be confident that you could catch fish at any time.
• Clearly last light (and probably first light) are best on this lake but with winter coming on expect to see smelting action throughout the day, particularly if its overcast.
• Lure choice can often make no differnece to your catch rate. I go through the ritual of changing lures every twenty minutes or so but on a day like this finding feeding fish was all you neeeded to do. Once you got a lure near them they'd smash anything. Unfortunately, this theory contradicts my other musings.
• I was thinking about bringing out the fly rod but had to ask myself why. The wind was blowing in our faces on the shore where we caught fish making casting really difficult. That means there would be less fly time in the water compared to lures using a spinning rod. And isn't a hard body or soft plastic just as tempting to a trout as a fly?
• In Fly Fishing Fundamentals Robert Sloane says when on a big lake for the first time you need to cover a lot of ground as the fish may be concentrated in a small area enmasse. Now the fish were only biting towards evening, so even if they were concentrated we wouldn't have known it until then. However, the three areas we checked out were very different from each other. The first was deep rocky territory, the second was lifeless silty mud and the third was rocky banks with extensive weed growth.  This looked to be the best as weed beds means growth which means food and cover for smaller fish and small fish mean big fish. So whenever you are on a big lake for the first time, make sure you walk around for a few k's to find the likely spots.

Ground baiting technique

This arvo I tried some English float fishing here:

https://maps.google.com/?ll=-37.713948,145.056535&spn=0.00522,0.006899&t=m&z=17

It is a lovely place with ducks, swallows and an ornamental pier but no fish. I tried feeding the area with bread crumbs and garlic spray from BCF. I add water to the mixture until it just clumps into golf ball size bits and throw them on top of my float every 5 minutes or so. The garlic spray really stinks and that made me think, perhaps it turns the fish off? And perhaps the berley itself will only attract lots of small fish. On this occassion nothing whatsoever happended and that got me thinking, was my ground bait turning the fish off? To answer the question I will now use a different ground bait approach.

Start by using no ground bait just in case there are some big fish around you already. Adding ground bait could simply attract loads of tiddlers who will steel your bait. If there are no signs of fish after 10 minutes then add some ground bait but start with plain old bread crumbs. Then after 5 minutes spice up the mizture by mixing in some Ultrabite. Then after a further 5 minutes add in the stinky garlic spray/chilly powder/crazy concotion you have read about on the English coarse fishing forums. This seems like a much more sensible, strutured approach and it can do no harm.

The Psychology of Freshwater Fishing In Still Waters

Last weekend I fished a few freshwater sections of the Merri River with my mate Roger. We fished for two to three hours using a variety of techniques - worms on the bottom of deep pools with a bit of berley; worms drifted through amazing looking runs; a variety of lures such as soft plastics, vibes, bibbed lures - you name it we tried it. Neither of us had a touch and we saw nothing to suggest there were fish in the river.

At our final location Roger got so disgusted he gave up fishing and sat there with the look of a beaten man. It wan't too long ago that freshwater fishing left me in a similar state. After two hours of dangling a worm and not getting a touch I assumed there were either no fish in the system or I didn't possess a mysterious magical power that would put me onto fish.

The situation revelaed the brutal truth of freshwater fishing - it's bloody hard. No

The depressed "I can't catch fish" state is really powerful. Instead of trying something new it makes you want to go home or just stare at the water in a miserable state. You feel that no matter what you do it's not possible to catch a fish. Fishing reports don't help the issue. og=ften you read

So what's going on here

It's amazing what this

there were some magic tricks I

I though the successful fisherman had tricks up there sleeve that I didn't possess. Or that  fishing into the sunset with my worm scraping the bottom of the four meter deep river wondering what we could do.

 We saw not a

There are so many books written on fishing yet none of them discuss the psychology of fishing. Why? Having the right attitude is more important weapon than any lure in your tackle box.

in your tackle box except that it's in your head.

Fishing reports never tell you how long the people fished for
There is no guide as to how long you should fish for to catch fish
There is no guide as to how important first light is on lakes
There is no guide on the importance of changing techniques

I wonder what smart fish taste like?

Have you ever noticed that lures look nothing like a real fish?

Let's take a look at this so called 'natural' lure:

Have you ever seen a fish that looked like this? I don't think so. Not even after a dozen beers. This looks nothing like any living creature. Then we have the even less natural:

Perhaps life on the outer rings of Saturn looks like this but not something on earth. Even soft plastics, I mean seriously, have you ever seen a living creature that looks like this?

You get my point here?

Perhaps that's why we don't really catch that many fish, because nothing that is meant to represent a fish actually looks like a fish? I mean was there a period in the 70's or something when they made realistic lures and then got rid of them because they didn't work?

Even if lures did look like our little gudgeon up yonder getting it to swim the way a gudgeon actually swims is the next trick.

It is a conspiracy I tell you!

We are being sold lures that some grand puppeteer knows look nothing like the real thing so we don't catch too many fish. We are living in the lure makers' Matrix.

They tell us fish have great eye sight, OK, well that leads to only one possible explanation. The fish we catch are the dumb ones, the guys who never made it out of fish kindie, the retard fish.

I wonder what smart fish taste like?

PS I'd like to see a fish tank with live bait versus a whole heap of lures. That would be the real test of whether all fish are idiots.

PSS For a further discussion on this topic, view this Angling Victoria thread.

Lessons from bass fishing at Blue Rock Dam

It wasn't too long ago that I approached lake fishing with a big ball sinker and a scrubbie tossed out as far as possible. If I hadn't' caught anything after an hour I surmised the lake probably didn't have any fish and we might as well go home. In the last few years fishing with members from the Preston Northcote Angling Club has taught me there are a huge number of angling techniques for any given situation. And changing just one tiny detail can be the difference between a bag of fish or an empty creel.

Good Friday I made the trip to Blue Rock Dam to fish with two administrators from anglingvictoria.com – Dunxy and Mick Tupong. Mick has a lot of success fish for bass on Blue Rock and he took us to a new spot he wanted to explore.

We started the fishing session by tossing around lures in 10 metres of water amongst the trees. I threw a bait rod over whilst piffing some lures around and still nothing. So we moved to a much shallower spot in 2-3 m of water on another part of the lake. I wasn't sure whether the weightless scrubbies were really getting to the bottom so I added a BB split shot and sure enough the bites started coming. This alerted me to two things. In the first spot my scrubbie was probably never on the bottom. Secondly, water depth, not just trees, can be crucial to your success. The shallows are obviously very warm this time of year whilst the deeper water is cooler. And in winter the reverse is true so perhaps that’s where the fish will shift to in the winter months. Whatever the case, if you are not getting bites try moving to shallower or deeper areas amongst the trees.

We must have caught over 30 bass for the day with the biggest just legal on 28cm. Almost all were caught on scrubbies. Clearly the fishery has several years to reach its full potential. Bass are a slow growing fish and it can take five years for them to break the 40cm mark. For that reason I think its essential all bass are returned to the water. They fight like demons and it would be a waste to strip the fishery of smaller fish when we could be fighting 40 cm plus fish in three to four years time. For that reason I am surprised the legal limit is only 28cm, it should be lifted to over 40cm in my opinion.

We were catching the odd redfin throughout the day but sunset brought on the big ones with two over 33cm. They came up great in the fry pan last night!

Bream Tips from the Maribyrnong Masters

Yesterday I competed at the Maribyrnong Masters and I put together this video of the day's events. I have to say, it's bloody hard to make a good video whilst you are fishing as you miss too many of the things you'd like to say because you are, you guessed it, fishing.

There were a few things I did right to secure my prize. Firstly I was fishing with 6lb mono and a 45cm 5lb fluro tippet. I wanted to fish weightless but there was some current in the river and without any weight I couldn't get to the bottom. I started by adding 1BB split shot but that didn't seem enough. So then I added another 1BB.

It's really hard to tell if you are actually getting to the bottom with as minimal a weight as possible. If you are on the bottom, there's is very little resistance and if you are not, then how do you know? Of course you could load on the lead but then you would loose natural presentation. By natural presentation I mean the way the bait sinks as it falls through the water column. I have often noticed hand fed bream smashing whatever I was feeding them, clearly because the bait was drifting down at a natural slow pace. My mate found this out the hard way. After an hour of watching me catch fish, he added an extra split shot and voila, he found his baits getting taken from the bottom.

I was using number 8 circle hooks and won't fish with anything else. I set the drag to absolute zero and let the fish hook themselves. I could go further and fish with an open bail arm and then slowly tighten when I see the fish taking line, perhaps I'll try that next time. Bait was scrubbies, garden worms, chicken, chicken soaked in oyster sauce and yabbies. The yabbies tended to have their heads bitten off but not the tails. I won't be using them again. The scrubbies, worms and chicken seemed to be equally successful.

The other key was the use of berley. We found structure where fish could hide under and then lure them out with burley. I have heard people say that bream need structure. But what do they mean? Do they mean isolated vertical poles or pontoons and piers the fish can stay under in the darkness. I suspect its the latter but don't have enough experience to really know. Once we located likely spots we lured the bream out with handfuls of bread with aniseed pellets. I wet the mixture just enough that it forms a ball that disintegrates as it sinks. If you wet it too much, there is no disintegration at all. It was clear this was a good idea, as several spots yielded zilch until the burely came out.

I have a few improvements to bream fishing I'd like to make on our next trip:

• Don't use berley unless you are aren't getting bites. It didn't happen on this trip but berley can attract lots of small fish.
• Use PVA bags to get an isolated amount of burely into one spot. Chucking in handfuls of bread spreads the burley over too big an area.
• Improve the burley mix. I'd like to add crushed pilchards or something with a real fishy smell.
• Improve my knots, we had several bust offs from big fish. There is a knot I'll be blogging about soon that creates an over 100% line strength connection. Why didn't I use it on this trip - laziness! Off course you could use a higher breaking strength line but then it might be seen.
• Learn how to use my rod. When the big fish strike I should probably tighten up the drag. Bream have hard bony mouths, I doubt the hook will tear out. This is probably a matter of experience but I will be tightening up a bit more on the next trip to find out.

Make Your Own Fly Fishing Leader

Here are the fly fihsinmg leaders I use. Why would you go to the trouble of making your own leader when premade leaders are not that expensive? To create a better rollover of your fly, particularly if you want a really long leader.

Leader formulas with Maxima Chameleon in the butt and Maxima Ultragreen as the tippet.

4.2m (13.8ft) Italian fly fishing leader for a 3 weight

25lb - 170 cm
15lb - 45 cm
10lb - 35 cm
6lb - 20 cm
4lb - 150 cm - tippet

4.2m (13.8ft) Italian dry fly fishing leader for a 7 weight

30lb - 140 cm
25lb - 35 cm
20lb - 35 cm
15lb - 35 cm
10lb - 35 cm
6lb - 140 cm - tippet

3.1m (10ft) "Standard" fly fishing leader

30lb - 90 cm
25lb - 25 cm
20lb - 25 cm
15lb - 25 cm
10lb - 25 cm
6lb - 120 cm - tippet

2.3m (7.5ft) Wet fly fishing leader for a 7 weight with heavy flies

30lb - 80 cm
25lb - 22 cm
20lb - 22 cm
15lb - 22 cm
10lb - 22 cm
6lb - 60 cm - tippet

I allow 7cm of leader loss when tying knots.

Note to self:

0.50. 160 - 180cm Potenza(butt) 25 lb maxima
0.37 45cm 15 lb maxima

0.28 35cm 10 lb maxima

0.22 20 cm 6 lb maxima

(0.18 - 0.12) 150 cm - tip