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In this second episode of our Critical Nymphing Concepts series, my friend, Austin Dando, and I walk through the idea — the concept — of having more influence or less over the flies. Meaning, who or what is in charge of the nymphs? Is it you or the river? And do we want to have more influence over the flies or less? What looks more natural? Which choice — which method — fools more trout?
We cover the following
- What is influence and what’s in charge of the nymph’s path?
- Does less influence look more natural?
- How weight and tippet diameter relate to influence.
- Why taking dry fly principles to the nymphs underneath leads to big mistakes.
- How slack hurts or helps the drift.
- The principle of slipping contact.
- Good and bad things about more influence.
- Good and bad things about less influence.
- Better systems for each method.
Resources
READ: Troutbitten | Tight Line and Euro Nymphing: Tracking the Flies
PODCAST: Troutbitten | #7, Nine Essential Skill for Tight Line and Euro Nymphing | Guiding the Flies
READ: Troutbitten | Tight Line and Euro Nymphing: Leading vs Tracking vs Guiding
READ: Troutbitten | Slipping Contact — Tight Line and Euro Nymphing
READ: Troutbitten | Tight Line Nymphing With an Indicator
READ: Troutbitten | Your Indicator Is Too Big
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Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com
Great podcast as always.
The influence question is extremely important in my local rivers, as the water types and depths change rapidly within short stretches.
My default approach is to try and minimise my influence on the flies to the extent possible. This usually brings fish to the net. When it comes to weight, I always look to use the least amount I can get away with to meet the fish where and how they’re willing to bite.
Usually to go deeper, you can add more weight, or to an extent add more slack to get the flies to drop quicker on landing. However, I think there are also lessons from traditional Japanese tenkara that are useful to tightlining, which are somewhat analogous systems. Tenkara flies (kebari) have a reverse hackle (from the western perspective, at least) that both enables dry flies to be animated on the surface and keeps wet flies at depth while being led. However, to get the wet flies to depth in the first place is a fascinating technique in itself. Instead of using weight, the angler uses currents to take the fly to depth. Not possible with all water types, and some rivers have few of these sorts of current features, but I hypothesise that a lot of anglers overweight their system beyond what is needed, which the fish can sometimes be quite picky about.
Love it
Dom: For me this is a next level concept. Reading the sghter can be decieving especially if your unintentionally crossing seams and or think your in the strike zone based on the slowdown of the sighter or Indy. For me based on what I learned from you while fishing eggs with you in December. How slow is slow and are you really down.Yes you can slip out of contact but as Austin said you might look 3 ft to the left and see the egg.Either I missed the take or I misread an unseen current. I’m sure in your series you will cover tags versus trailers. We both know trailers introduce unseen slack in to the system. I plan to start my days erroring with to much weight and adapting from there. Look forward to the upcoming episodes
Sorry to hog the comments, but it also occurred to me that this podcast didn’t mention the sighter as a tool for providing feedback on what the flies are doing. I use the sighter to read whether I’m getting the fly/flies in one seam, or to the desired depth, and to balance how much I’m leading vs maintaining contact vs allowing a little slack.
Your Youtube video on reading the sighter is fantastic.
Thanks John. We mentioned Slipping the Sighter for contact, and that is influence. All the rest of what we read on the Sighter is arguably better in another podcast. But there’s a lot of crossover! Thanks for your kind words.
Dom
Great podcast. I very much enjoy euro nymphing with a tight line. When I am fishing on the Salmon River for steelhead I continue the tight line consept but tight to my weights with the tipet below the weights. There is a lot of potential for slack in the system below the weights depending on the length of the tipet. Do you think it is an advantage to go shorter with the tipet? The usual lenth of tipet below the weights is 3ft to the fly.
Honestly, I would not rig that far flies that far past your weights. There’s way too much chance for unmanaged slack. You lose strike detection, accuracy and any reliable knowledge about where your nymphs really are. I know many people feel differently, but I just think it’s a mistake.
I would rig the split shot just five or six inches above your point fly.
That said, you should rig the tippet section however you like to suit your needs.
Hope that helps.
Cheers.
Dom
I would
thanks Dom