Littoral Zone #20 | Sinking Line Tactics for Stillwater Fly Fishing with Phil Rowley

Phil (2s): Hi, Phil here and thanks for taking the time to join me today on my Littoral Zone podcast. Before we take a deep dive, pun definitely intended on sinking lines and how I like to use them, I wanted to first answer a question I recently received from Gwenda Gwenda asked an excellent question about Stillwater Trout and whether they are territorial or if they travel all over the lake. First of all, thanks to GW for taking the time to contact me. If any of you have Stillwater specific questions like Gwenda’s, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me through my website, philrowleyflyfishing.com, via email at philrowley@philrowleyflyfishing.com or through my social pages, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. Phil (46s): Just search for philrowleyflyfishing and you will find me now onto my response to Gwenda. Depending on the specific trout species and the lakes they live in, trout can be both territorial and migratory. If a Trout’s basic needs are met in one region of the lake, such as access to food, well oxygenated water and proximity to a deep water refuge, trout will stay in that area as there’s no need to move. Biologists have used radio tags to track and document this behavior, which they often call discrete populations. For instance, I’ve seen brown trout adopt a territorial behavior on certain lakes as they patrol a territory and hunt for food. Phil (1m 29s): Deep water and other basic needs are always nearby in case they need them. I also believe in other lakes, trout move and cruise over a wide area if the lake has inflow or outflow streams. They can also cause movement. Since Stillwater trout need flowing water in the form of a river or stream to reproduce inflow streams in particular can attract trout as water temperatures rise during a warm summer. The inflow stream provides cool oxygen-rich water food brought in by the current and protection in the form of a rippled surface created by the current flow. Seasonal changes also influence trout movement in early winter on lakes that ice over trout tend to slide into deeper water. Phil (2m 17s): However, as the lake begins to stratify thermally, the trout are pushed into shallower water as that’s where the oxygen levels are highest throughout the summer, the shallows can also warm enough to cause oxygen levels to drop prompting trout to move to deeper water near the thermocline, which forms at the point where sunlight penetrates the water or the maximum stent extent, rather that the sun penetrates the water below the thermocline. Oxygen levels are typically low, although some species such as lake trout have adapted to live in these deeper low oxygen zones. Remember, the thermocline acts as a barrier to mixing, which prohibits those deeper water from getting up to the surface to diffuse with atmospheric air and get re oxygenated. Phil (3m 6s): If you wanna learn more about how lakes work and understanding of the seasons of the lake, be sure to check out the two part series I recorded with good friend and former fisheries biologist, Brian Jan. I’ll put the links to these episodes in the show notes below. Now let’s get on to today’s episode. Well, as I said in my introduction, today’s podcast is all about sinking lines, sort of entitle this going deep sinking line tactics and strategies for still waters. So what we’re gonna talk to you about today is why and when you’d wanna use sinking lines. Have a discussion of the different sinking lines that are out there. We’re gonna talk about density, compensation, sweep lines and things like that. Phil (3m 49s): We’re gonna have a good discussion of understanding sink rates and how you can use that to your advantage when you’re on the water. We’re gonna talk about some tips on choosing the right sinking line for the situation you’re facing. We’re gonna talk about some sinking line tricks, techniques and tactics as well. Things I like to do when I’m on the water and using sinking lines and some of the leaders and rigging options I use depending on the different sink rates and different densities of lines I’m using. So why would you wanna use a sinking line anyway? Well, I think when most people look at fly fishing still waters, they think immediately of a subsurface game and a sinking line just makes complete sense. The majority of trout, of course, feeds subsurface and when you using a sinking line, you are generally pulling the line in more of a horizontal manner, which is the way most trout food moves in lakes with the exception of emerging Romy pupa. Phil (4m 40s): And we have a sinking line or a few sinking line methods that we use there as well of of course the line gets your fly down there and it holds it down there so you can keep your fly in the zone when fishing. Remember with still waters, typically I am always trying to find that depth zone that the fish are feeding in and choose a presentation technique that best keeps my fly there for as long as possible. If trout are deep, think about lake trout. Let’s not just talk about rainbows, browns, tigers, cutthroat, those kind of things, but lake trout as well. And they’re known for residing deep. So we’re gonna talk today about a method I like to use when targeting lake trout in deep water and we’re talking 40, 50, 60, 70 feet down. Phil (5m 20s): So a sinking line definitely gives you the ability to target trout in deeper water. I mentioned the horizontal retrieve path that sinking lines provide and that’s the way most food sources move. Sinking lines get below the surface so when it’s windy and choppy out there, they’re not gonna be impacted by that. Whereas if you use a floating line set up, whether that’s an indicator or a long liter and a weighted fly, that surface chop can put an unnatural action on the floating line which transmits down to the flies. And also casting those longer leader setups are not fun in really windy conditions. A sinking line slices through that surface chop and allows you to have more contact with your flies and subsequently catch more fish ’cause you’re not missing the takes and depending on the line you choose and how long you let it sink, you have the ability to work and cover the entire water column from top or just below the surface rather to the bottom. Phil (6m 16s): So what sinking line types are out there? Well, there’s a number of different sinking lines out there and we’ll start from the slowest sink rate line and work our way down to the fastest ones. We have intermediate lines. These are typically within a manufacturer, the lines that sink the slowest. There are pure intermediate still called that. There are hover lines as well. Some manufacturers such as Rio and scientific anglers use that term for their super slow sinking lines. These are lines that sink at an poultry one inch per second, super slow. Then you have your clear intermediates, these sink anywhere from about one and a half to two, maybe two and a half inches per second. Some manufacturers actually have two sync rates within their clear intermediate line. Phil (7m 1s): These lines have pretty well replaced a type two sinking line because a line when they talk about the type of line like a type three a type four, a type five, a type two, as I mentioned earlier, they’re really talking about the sync rate of the line. So the line a type three sinks at approximately three inch per second, a type five at five inches per second and so on. And we’re gonna talk about how we’re gonna use those syn rates later on in the podcast today to your advantage. So you can time your flies down and surgically prospect different depths. But the clear intermediate has replaced that type two because the clear intermediate line has that marketability, if you will, of the clear line and stealth. Phil (7m 43s): I’m not so sure that’s necessary all the time. But the one time a clear intermediate line really comes in handy is a clear calm day with clear water and line shadow. So what do I mean by line shadow? That’s when you’re casting out retrieving your line. The sun, if it’s a solid line, will create a shadow on the bottom. And of course when you’re stripping your line in, that’s gonna move the shadow moves. And fish don’t like moving things ’cause that usually means death from above in the form of a raptor or something. So the clear intermediate line allows the line to pass through it and makes it less visible to the trout. So really ideal line to use in clear situations and shallow as well. Phil (8m 24s): Then you have What I call your full syncing lines. Now hovers and clear and intermediates are full syncing lines, but we’re talking lines that sink faster than three inches per second. So again, you’re type three, you type five, you type six, you type seven. And I believe there’s some manufacturers out there that are making lines that sink in excess of seven inches per second, which is what a type seven syncs approximately at. Now, as always pays to when it comes to sync rates to look at the manufacturer’s sync rates as they print them on the box or on their websites ’cause they do vary. And on some of the less expensive sinking lines, you can have a type five line in a five weight for example, sinks at five inches per second. Phil (9m 7s): But a type seven because of the denser coating, more tungsten actually sinks a little faster than that. Your sort of higher end lines are all going to be typically they’re gonna be, they’re all gonna sink at the same rate regardless of line weight. You also have sweep lines, we’ll talk about those in a little more detail in a second. non-ST stretch lines, which I really like. And these are lines that do not stretch. We’ll talk about those in a bit a second. We’re gonna talk about some traditional sinking lines I mentioned already about you’ll find some sort of lesser price lines. Your traditional sinking lines that are not density compensated are gonna have a little different sinking properties than a density compensated line. Phil (9m 48s): So I mentioned low stretch lines. Now most of your, and and I believe I covered this in my earlier podcast, making sense of still water fly lines. I did a two part podcast on that. I’ll put the links to the that podcast in the show notes. And I also recently had Chris Walker from Real Products on and we talked about low stretch lines there as well. I believe, again, I’ll have the links to those, that podcast as well. But if you miss those typical regular multi-filament, basically Dacron core lines can stretch up to 30% and that can cause a few issues. Bite detection, casting, there’s kind of a, if you think about how that stretch factor works, it can work against you. Phil (10m 29s): So that’s why I really like low stretch lines that typically stretch only at about 6%. So it’s almost imperceptible if you were to put the line between both hands and give it a pull, you can really see the stretch on a regular multi-filament core line. But your low stretch lines that are built on more of a braided core have little to no stretch. 6% is almost imperceptible. So what’s the benefit of this line? Well first of all, if the line has no stretch, when a fish grabs your fly, you have better sensitivity, you have better ability, I believe, to recognize those strikes. I think airflow one time had on their marketing campaign on their sixth sense line, which is one of the two companies, Rio B and the other one that to the best of my knowledge does low stretch lines. Phil (11m 15s): They have their sixth sense. If a fish breeze on your fly, you’ll feel it. Don’t think they’re quite that sensitive, but again they’re just trying to talk to the, to the increased sensitivity. You get better hook set because your, your hook set is more efficiently transmitted down to the fly allowing you to hook those fish, particularly if they’re taking soft. Now some might argue, yeah, well no stretch, you’re gonna break fish off. You gotta remember that a fly rod is built as a shock absorber and the long rods we favor for Stillwater fly fishing, sort of those moderate actions, these, those are the ones I like to use with a soft forgiving tip are gonna absorb that hook set as well. So the break offs should be minimal if at all. Phil (11m 55s): Also casting, believe it or not, is actually better with a low stretch line because when on the forward and back cast, when you stop the rod and allow to the rod to release the energy and propel the line on the stop that you’ve put in from your casting stroke, there’s no expansion and contraction of the line. So that’s gonna allow you, when that rod stops, your power is more efficiently transmitted to the line that’s going to increase the line speed, which is gonna put more flex or bend or load in the rod and allow you to cast more efficiently and actually cast further distance as well. I really notice a difference when I cast a low stretch line versus a regular multifilament core line. Phil (12m 37s): Again that can stretch and finally fighting fish. You get a benefit when you’re fighting the fish with these low stretch lines because the corrective actions you use to defeat a fish during the fight or more efficiently transmitted help you tire a fish quickly and release it and let it go and get out there and catch another one. So again, big fan of the low stretch lines and to the best of my knowledge, I believe I mentioned it earlier, real products and airflow are the two manufacturers that I’m aware of that make the low stretch lines. The other line I mentioned in that laundry list of fly lines is the clean sweep or sweep lines or parabolic lines. And these lines are specifically designed with different syn rates along their length. Phil (13m 22s): So typically the ones I use from Rio in their clean sweep come in two different sync formulations, a fast and a slow. So you’re gonna see kind of a a crazy line markings on the box, like a wait forward seven syn S four slash S six slash i. What does that mean? Well this line is built that basically it’s a weight forward seven sink. So it’s a weight forward seven s with a line that has a four inch per second sink rate at the back end, a midsection the belly section that sinks at about six inches per second and a short seven to 10 foot section of intermediate that sinks at about two inches per second. Phil (14m 4s): So what this gives you is kind of a U-shaped travel path of the line through the water during your retrieve. And I really like to use these kind of lines when I’m fishing off points off drop offs or lock styling, which I’ll touch on briefly. We’ve had other episodes where we’ve talked about that as well and I plan on having future ones where you’re drifting over deep water and trout. When you’re fishing on deep water, you may be over 50, 60 feet. That doesn’t mean the trout are sucked tight to the bottom. Quite often the water chemistry doesn’t allow them to get down there, the oxygen content isn’t to their liking. So they’ll stack or suspend mid depth or in the upper portion of the water. Phil (14m 45s): And the sweep line allows you to retrieve your flies through a bunch of different depths to target where the fish are. And when you start to realize how these lines work, I find them really helpful to determine the feeding depth of the holding depth of the fish. So if you make a cast and you get your takes early in the retrieve where that fly is going to be still up in the water and not being pulled down through the U-shaped retrieve path, these lines create, that’s gonna tell you the fish are perhaps further up in the water column and you can use perhaps a slower syn rate line to target that specific depth. Or you could flip right over to a floating line set up with an indicator and target that depth too. Phil (15m 30s): If you get your retrieves towards the ladder part where the line swings back up towards the rod tip as you’re finishing your retrieve where the line is the deepest, that’s gonna tell you the fish are perhaps holding a little deeper. And again, you could use faster sink rate lines or depending on the water depth you’re you’re fishing into, you might be able to use an indicator and a much longer leader to target those. So a very handy line, love to use them when I’m prospecting into deeper water, they also work well. The slower syn rate one I use from Rio also works well in shallow waters. That line has the same intermediate tip, the midsection sinks at four inches per second and the back end of the line sinks at three inches per second. Phil (16m 12s): I believe. And this is ideal when trout are taking water boatman and back swimmers. These are little air breathing insects that become active in early spring and late fall when they can fly and they go on these mating and migration flights and because they’re air breathers, they dive back into the water, scoot down to the bottom, do their thing, and have to come up and replenish their little air bubble that they trap along their bodies. And of course that gives them this what we refer to as a huge shaped travel path where they’re going down to the bottom, coming back up to get their replenish, their air supply and back down. And a slow sinking version of a sweep line or a clean sweep line in this instance is ideal for that situation when trout are getting, You know, are used to seeing their food move in a certain way, sometimes the retrieve angle is really important. Phil (16m 59s): Now other manufacturers do this in a 3 5 3 configuration where there’s three inch per second syn rate at the rear of the line, a five inch per second belly section and a three inch per second tip section. It’s all the same trying to get this U-shaped travel pass. So a really unique line that’s gaining popularity in recent years and one that I believe is well worth adding to your kit bag. Stonefly Nets (17m 26s): Stonefly nets build handcrafted landing nets that are as tough as they are beautiful, they’re shaped, sanded, and finished by hand from premium hardwoods. You’ll feel the difference the moment you land your first fish light in the hands strong at the hoop and made by someone who knows what it means to earn your trust. You can head over to stonefly nets.com right now and see what they’ve got in the shop today. That’s stonefly nets.com located in Boulder, Colorado. 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The other thing I mentioned was density compensation. So years ago when fly lines were made, the tungsten powder they use to impregnate the coating to help the line sink tended to concentrate in the belly section of the line. Phil (19m 10s): That’s where it was most dense. So you tended to get the line that sank in a sort of U-shaped path. I guess you could argue similar to a sweep line or a clean sweep line. But what the argument against it wasn was you were now trying to feel a strike around a curve and then there was loss of bite detection. Now is that a risk with a sweep line? Sure, I guess it is. But most of the times, I’ll be honest, when I’m fishing sweep lines, I’m fishing a more active retrieve. I could be fishing a tractor pattern such as a booby or a fab. These have foam in them if you’re not familiar with those flies, these are flies that also by putting them on a sweep system help enhance that U-shape path. Phil (19m 50s): But we tend to fish more aggressive presentations, at least I do when I’m fishing sweep lines. So I’m moving the fly fast and You know when the faster you move the fly a fish tends to have to use more energy and aggression to take that fly. You’re gonna have a stronger take. So, but the argument when you’re fishing slowly is you didn’t have that, You know, direct contact between yourself and the fly. So the manufacturers came up with a process called density compensation where they adjust the sink rate of the fly line so it sinks, it’s like a sink tip if you will. The tip section sinks the fastest and so you get a more straight sink path, more of a as it goes down kind of diagonal if you will, through the water straight down until you fly sinks and you have that more direct contact too. Phil (20m 38s): Now sometimes you can’t get density compensation in the fastest sinking line within a manufacturer and that’s because if they can only make a line that sinks at seven inches per second to make that line sink faster, you have to add a tip section that sinks faster than type seven. And if they don’t make that any faster, then it’s tough to add density compensation to that line. So not all sinking lines are density compensated, but these are things you are going to see in the higher end lines within a manufacturer. Typically your entry level sinking lines are not gonna feature density compensation ’cause that’s an extra manufacturing process and that’s why some of the high end lines are more expensive. Phil (21m 23s): One of the reasons. So with all the line types out there, what lines should I have in there? What are the three, if I was to break them down to a top three sinking lines, what would they be? Well first of all, I’d, I’d like the clear intermediate. That is a very good line for fishing shallow water situations, slow retrieves where the sink rate of the line isn’t gonna overpower your retrieve. The next line would be a type three that sinks at about three inches per second and then another line that sinks at about seven inches per second. So that allows you to cover the sink rate of a slow sinking line, like a clear intermediate all the way down to the fastest sinking. And again, if you followed my understanding making sense rather of still water fly lines, the three core lines I would recommend would be a floating line, a clear intermediate and some fast sinker type three, type five, type seven. Phil (22m 14s): But if you’re just looking at sinking lines, I would have a clear intermediate, a type three, A type seven. And then as your budgets, your desires, your skillset allows, then you start filling in the blanks with the other lines, your type fives, perhaps the sweep lines I mentioned the hovers, those as well. They all have their place and it can be a little overwhelming. So what are some of the things you think about when you’re trying to choose the correct fly line for the situation you’re facing? I think one of the key things for me is not to think about it as a race to the bottom. It’s not about getting your fly down to a depth as fast as you can. Phil (22m 54s): You need to be able to make a cast, allow the line to sink and to allow that line to not sink so fast that it overpowers the retrieve speed you are using to move that fly horizontally or more or less horizontally through the water. If your line sinks too fast for the situation, you’re just gonna be along the bottom and in the debris and getting all hooked up and frustrated. So you gotta think about the food source you’re imitating the speed of that prey and the associated presentation techniques, remember most, well every food source in lakes are not, they don’t have rocket packs tied to their back. So they are not moving fast, they’re generally slow and erratic. If you think about a freshwater shrimp scud, a leach, even a dragonfly nph that’s capable of scooting along at times for the most part they are just, You know, doing their thing and going from point A to point B, they’re not doing it very fast. Phil (23m 50s): Closely linked to that is the activity level of the fish. So if the fish are aggressive and willing to chase, you can use faster retrieve speeds, therefore you can use a faster syn rate line. So higher activity equals faster sync rates. So when we’re fishing at tractors, boobies and fabs and abs worms and You know tons of tractors out there nowadays we generally fish those pretty quick. And so when we’re doing that I can use a fast sinking line to fish those flies ’cause I can get the flies down to depth and I’m moving them so quickly through the water there’s little to no risk of a hangup. Weighted flies have an impact on the sink rate of your line. Remember that you’ve chosen a fly line to sink at a set depth and you put a cone head, wooly bugger, tungsten cone head that’s going to increase the sink rate of your line. Phil (24m 38s): Generally I try not to use too much in the way of weighted flies when I’m fishing. I’d much rather prefer to have the differing syn rates of the line drag the fly down than rely on any kind of internal weight bead head cone head, those kind of things. Slower syn rate lines I like to use when I’m fishing from an anchored position because I’m not moving, I have the luxury of time I can cast it out and just let that fly line sink. Whether that fly line sinks at one inch per second, three inches per second or seven inches per second, they’re all gonna get down to the bottom. If you’re sitting still or You know conversely standing on a bank as well, you’ll get the same thing if you’re fishing lock style from a drifting boat or trolling, which I’ll be honest I don’t like to do So I’m not gonna spend little or any time on trolling. Phil (25m 25s): And the reasons I don’t like trolling, first of all I like to move the fly and be part of the fish’s decision and have some input in that. And when you troll, you go through the water first and your flies follow second and in certain situations that can startle or spook fish and you’re not going to have the chance to catch ’em. I like to fish if I’m going to move water, sorry, cover water, move through it. I like to fish lock style from a drifting boat. I’ll touch upon that a little bit later. And the faster you drift with lock style, you are casting down wind, right, your flies are preceding you, that’s one of the benefits of this method. And then you are allowing them to sink and retrieve the flies back. Phil (26m 7s): If you’re drifting quickly ’cause the wind is stronger, you’re gonna have to use a faster syn rate line. Conversely, if it’s a light wind day you can use slower sink rate lines because you’re not drifting as fast. The one thing you wanna think of as an analogy I use throughout my still water presentation philosophy is something I call DRP. Most people I find in lakes they are very pattern specific. And don’t get me wrong, patterns are important. You know, the size and the shape and the color and how you move the fly is a very important part of successful stillwater fly fishing. But it’s not the most important part. I think most people, when they see another angler doing well, they always wanna know what fly are you using? What fly are you using when really you should think about first, what depth are they presenting at? Phil (26m 52s): I find trout in lakes much more selective on depth than they are on patterns. So if you have the best fly in the world, if you don’t put it in the right place and move it the right way, you’re not gonna catch fish. So depth is important, making sure you choose the right syn rate line to get to the depth. And typically in lakes we are trying to get our flies and keep them there about one to three feet off the bottom. That’s where all the food lives and that’s where trout feels safe and secure. And feeding the R in the DRP acronym here is retrieve. So move your fly at the right retrieve. And generally in lakes we’re using slow pedestrian retrieves erratic so that impacts the sync rate of your line and tend to fish slower Syn rate lines. Phil (27m 37s): When I’m doing more suggestive imitative retrieves probably a type three would be a very fast line in those situations. Fish a lot of hover lines, a lot of clear intermediates and then patterns. So again, DRP depth of presentation retrieve that you’re using and then the pattern, they’re all important, one A, one B, one C, and some days pattern can certainly trump and and match the hat situations. Patterns can be very very important. But again, if you don’t put the fly at the right depth and don’t move it in a way, the fish accept it doesn’t matter. So again, DRP depth retrieve pattern. Now with all these lines I’ve talked about, you can only bring so many rods in the boat with you. Phil (28m 17s): I typically like to have two to three rods strung and ready to go. This makes, if I wanna change a presentation method, it’s just a matter of You know, reeling in, stowing the hook properly and putting it down and picking up the other rod and start fishing with that one. But that can be problematic if you’ve got multiple lines. I don’t advocate seven or eight rods ’cause if you’ve done any lines in boats or float tubes or pon too much, You know they love to tangle and it’s just a lot to manage there. So if you wanna change lines, if the two or three you’ve got strung up aren’t working, you want to change. And this is particularly challenging if you’re in a float tube or a pontoon boat where you can’t stand up or you don’t have the mobility around that you might have in a boat. Phil (28m 58s): It’s challenging. So What I like to do is I will leave the point fly on, if I got droppers, I’ll probably remove them, reel the fly line in. And ideally I want to get the junction of the fly line and the butt section or the leader that you’ve attached to the fly line between the fly rod, between the reel rather and the stripping guide. And then I’ll take a wooden close peg and I will use that close plague to pinch and hold the leader against the rod blanket. It’s not gonna crush or damage the blank, it’s gonna simply hold that leader in place. Then you take your nippers, you trim the leader away from the fly line right at the welded loop or again shameless self-promotion here. Phil (29m 39s): This is one of the reasons for the Rio Ambassador series of lines I helped develop with Rio where we put the tipt ring in. It makes for really easy line changes. You just cut the leader, take the spool off or the reel off place the replacement reel, the new line you’re gonna put on onto your reel or onto your rod. Pull out the end of the line, do a clinch knot to that tippet ring or welded loop trim that end a couple of false casts and you’ve threaded the rod and you’re ready to fish. You’ve changed the line. It takes less than a minute when you get proficient at this to change a line. So again, the hardest part with changing lines on the water is threading the rod. Phil (30m 22s): And this method allows you to sit, sit down and quickly change the line in the blink of an eye. It really works well. Not just with sinking lines but any other line types you’d like to change over to. So let’s talk a little bit about sinking line leaders. Leaders. The general rule is the faster the sink rate, the shorter the leader because what we’re trying to do here is we’ve spent money and invested in a line that sinks at a set rate and we wanna make sure when our fly line is sinking, because this comes in a little bit later when we use a technique called the countdown, we’ll just explain in a little bit that we want our flies roughly on the same level or plane as the fly line. Phil (31m 3s): It’s no good if your flies are off doing something else and your fly line’s at a set depth that you can control and count to, you’ve got, You know, essentially a three, four, $5 item influencing an item that’s over a hundred dollars being the fly line, the fly being the cheaper thing, the fly line being the more expensive thing. So the faster the sink create, the shorter the leader to keep things close. So slower sinking lines obviously can be longer. So if I’m fishing clear intermediates, hover lines, I’ll have leaders anywhere from say nine feet to 1214 feet because that line sinks slowly. Nylon leaders, I still use nylon for a lot of my majority of my leader and have the final tippet section of fluorocarbon. Phil (31m 45s): So they’re gonna sink more or less at the same level, your faster sinking lines, a type three I might start with a seven and a half foot and then a short as a five foot if I’m fishing at type seven. Now this is single fly situation only. If you are in an area or like to fish multiple flies, of course there’s gonna be increased spacing between the flies that is going to lengthen the leader as well. If you’re just new to Stillwater fishing and not quite used to the long leaders we often use here, a simple system is to start with a, You know, if you’re fishing anything from a type three line and slower, so a type three, a clear intermediate that sinks at a one and a half, two inch per second rate or a hover, I would start just with a seven and a half foot tapered nylon leader and add tip it to build out the balance of your leader. Phil (32m 33s): That way you get the leader length necessary to for the situation you’re facing. But you’ve also got the leader with the butt section. A little bit of support until you get more proficient at casting longer leaders. If you’ve done any euro nymphing at all, You know micro leaders are in thin to win. And of course those leaders are a little bit more challenging if you do any research on that kind of stuff. They always say we’ll start with a thicker leader system first. Get comfortable casting that system and then you can progress onto a thinner leader that is more effective but also comes with the higher risk of tangles. And generally the clearer the water, the finer the leader that’s kind of standard with murky water, You know, lots of suspended algae, those kind of things, suspended debris that masks your leader up a little bit. Phil (33m 18s): You can get away with a a little bit more stouter tipt or leader, but you’ll also see many anglers, particularly competition anglers using level leader. So this is a leader that’s built, it might be all built out of eight pound tipt all the way along and that’s again, helps keep the sink rate consistent along the leader’s length. Allows you to use longer leader systems with droppers and things like that. But of course it’s thinner, it’s more tangled prone. So again, if you’re new to this, rather than jumping right into that level leader, maybe start with that seven and a half footer and add, tip it from there to get a little bit of balance between castability and presentation. The beauty of a, as a level leader as well is you can obviously build them yourself. Phil (34m 1s): You know, You know some angular, start with like a a section of of thinner diameter butt section, You know, ’cause a lot of times a a standard seven and a half foot liter may have a butt section that’s about 50 pound diameter. And so they might start rather than using a big thick 50 pound, it might be three feet of 20 pound, two feet of 15 pound and what’s that, 50 to three two, another two or three feet of three x or eight pound tipt and then build a liter out from there, put a tippe ring on the end of it and do that. I often put tippet rings now on the end of a leader to sort of keep the integrity of that main leader section intact and I can ebb and flow, add and subtract, tip it all day long without impacting the base leader itself. Phil (34m 43s): So the other benefit of a level leader system is if you follow it up and tangle it up, it’s easy to rebuild. You don’t have to take things out of the package and unravel ’em and all that kind of stuff. So again, type three lines or less, probably 12 feet, 14 feet is good. Average length if you’re fishing that faster sinking line like a type five or greater, that’s where a short is five feet, two sections of tip it. That’s all you need. When we’re dangling fishing kum, it’s vertically using fast sinking lines. I’m gonna cover that in a little bit more detail in a second. My leader for that is about three feet of two x say 10 or 12 pound tipt fluorocarbon to a two to three feet section of three x or four x tipt. Phil (35m 25s): I connect those two together using a swivel. Sometimes a tippet ring or a triple surgeon’s, not generally if it’s windier out with this dangling method, we’re gonna use more weight because of the wind induced current that can occur. I probably use a swivel if it’s clear and calm and fish could be put off by the subtle flash of a tippet ring or more overt flash of a swivel, then I’m probably gonna use a triple surgeons not so simple leader systems. You know, probably the most complex leader system I use in Stillwater fishing is What I use for indicators. And one day, we’ll soon we’ll have a podcast all about indicator tactics and techniques as well. So the important thing we’ve talked about sinking lines is the difference syn rates, they come in, You know, anywhere from one inch per second with that hover or traditional intermediate all the way down to seven inches or greater. Phil (36m 19s): And what’s the big deal with that? Well it’s important to understand the sync rates of the line so you can use them to your advantage. Again, to choose the right sync rate for the situation. For a countdown technique, remember DRP, we are trying to get to the fly depth is the most important thing. I’m trying first then retrieve, then pattern. So I wanna make sure if I’m using a fly line that sinks at three inches per second, I can take advantage of that sink rate to fish my presentation, how I want and consistently target the same depth if I catch fish there. So how do you do that? Well generally we call it the countdown method and again, it’s based on understanding the sink rate of your lines and knowing how to use them. Phil (37m 2s): We again want to use a line that doesn’t overpower retrieve. There’s no use in using a fly line. It sinks faster than you can move the fly horizontally through the water because you’re just eventually gonna hit the bottom and get all tangled up and you’re gonna be underneath the fish if the lake’s super deep anyway and not catching anything. So there’s two ways to do this. We’re not just when we’re present, I’m sorry, when we’re presenting and using still water sinking lines, we are not just a chuck and chance at a probe. We just don’t cast it out there and stare around and maybe answer a text or organize a fly box or eat half a sandwich. There’s a method to the madness. We are always in control of all the things we can control. Phil (37m 42s): A fish are doing enough things to throw us off as it is. So the more things you can control, the better your results should be. So we always, when we’re fishing sinking lines, we wanna count them down and experiment with different syn rates, sorry, different sync times to target specific depth. So there’s two ways I do this. There’s a technique I call the five count and another one called the rule of 12. So the five count is What I use when I don’t know the depth. Maybe I don’t have electronics, I’m fishing from a bank, I have no real idea of how deep it is out in front of me. I’m just using a trial and error or experimental system where I’m gonna cast it out and allow it to sink. Phil (38m 23s): Five seconds, 10 seconds, a factor of five. So I may make, might make two or three casts, five seconds synch rate, 10 seconds, 15 seconds and so on. And if I catch a fish, I wanna remember which count I was on. If I hook the bottom, I know where the bottom is and I start experimenting from there. So that’s, if you’re unsure of the depth, you’re basically working from the surface down. Now the rule of 12 is based on You know how deep the water you’re fishing in, you’ve got a sounder, you’ve got electronics, maybe you’ve got a marked anchor rope. What do I mean by that? Well before Sounders we used to take our anchor ropes and place marks on them at a different, You know, maybe three feet apart, five feet apart. Phil (39m 6s): And literally if three, if the marks were five feet apart and three marks went over the side of the boat and hit the bottom, three times five is 15 feet. I knew I was in 15 feet So I knew the depth And the rule of 12, when You know the depth, you take the sink rate of your fly line again measured at inches per second and divide that into 1212 inches in a foot. It’s gonna tell you how long it takes that line to sink one foot. So a line that sinks three inches per second goes into 12 four times. That means it’s gonna take that line, that type three line to sink, four seconds approximately to sink a foot. So if you wanna go 10 feet down, you multiply that by the depth you wanna target. Phil (39m 47s): So 10 times four is a approximately a 42nd sink time. Again, we’re being very surgical here so when we catch a fish we can repeat that process and successfully target the depth and be as successful as we can. Now I mentioned I said approximately there’s some factors that come in. Multiple flies add weight a little bit more. Water density varies with temperature. So, and the more line you cast, the more of that tungsten powder that used to sink the line is in the water. The line’s gonna accelerate a little bit, but we’re doing a level best to be surgical in our approach. So when we catch a fish, we can duplicate it again and again and again and consistently target a zone. Phil (40m 31s): So that’s the countdown method. Either the rule of 12, again, that’s when You know the depth. You divide the sink rate of your line into 12, 12 inches in a foot line sinks four inches per second. It’s gonna take three seconds to go one foot. If we don’t know we’re gonna use the five count method. We’re going to start basically working from the top of the water or the upper part of the water and work our way down in five second increments and just experiment until you either catch fish or hit the bottom. We’re just basically trying to train our brain to remember what we did in that time between when the fly lands and when the retrieve starts. So if we hook a fish, we know we can remember what the heck we’re doing and duplicate it. Phil (41m 11s): Okay with retrieves. Nothing terribly different here with retrieves, with sinking lines as opposed to fishing floating lines. I typically, once that cast is made, I always like to begin any retrieve Stillwater retrieve with two quick strips. First of all, this confirms I’ve taken any slack that has perhaps formed while a line was sinking. Again, I always try to be tight to the fly during the sink because it’s quite common for a fish to eat the fly as it sinks or on the drop, all of a sudden your fly line jumps to life, you get that tug and you’ve got a fish on. So if you wanna make sure you’ve got no slack in there but you just wanna confirm it. So two quick strips. Another thing that does is it also attracts being an optimist, I think we all have to be optimist When we fish, we have the ability to attract a fish in. Phil (41m 59s): The fish may see those flies to descend into view and all of a sudden they jump suddenly and that just triggers the trout to respond, swim over and grab ’em. If you’re fishing buoyant flies boobies, fabs spun and clip deer hair, dragon fly nims, things like that flies with built-in buoyancy with, a lot of times we’re using sinking lines to drag those flies down near the bottom. The line can run over the bottom debris, but that fly stays just above where the fish are cruising and feeding. It’s always a good idea when those flies land to give ’em a good strip to pop ’em below the surface, get them on their way down the bottom. But the other benefit of doing that is you could have a fish up near the surface and that pop of that disturbance as those flies go under the water, can attract fish and you can get a grab right after. Phil (42m 42s): And again, we’re using varied retrieves. Think about the food sources. You’re moving, sorry you’re imitating, but you’re using varied strips. You’re going to maybe use strip retrieves hand twists, rollie ply where you tuck the rod under your arm and kind of do a hand over hand retrieve. You’re doing different retrieves and experimenting to figure out what the fish are. Typically if they’re active, you’re seeing fish moving around, swirling at the surface, jumping out of the water, those kind of things. Those are more active. You might be able to get away with a faster pace retrieve. If it looks solemn and doesn’t look like anything’s moving out there, that’s when you gotta use the slow stuff. Or you’re fishing. Food sources that don’t move very fast may fly nims kind of flutter and pause, flutter and pause. Phil (43m 26s): You’re going to use maybe a four or five turn hand twist with a pause, four or five hand twists with pause most things in lakes. Move a little bit, take a break, move a little bit, take a break, move a little bit, take a break so that stop, start motion erratic work best. So other presentation techniques when you’re fishing, sinking lines, remember stab your rod tip into the water surface you want. You have no visual clues like you do with a strike indicator or a floating line where you can see that floating line move or obviously the indicator move or pull under the waters to signify a take. So you wanna have that direct connection between yourself and the fly. So put that rod tip right under the surface, stab it in there. A lot of times I’m at least to the first guide or even the second guide so when that fish takes, I’m right there and I can react to it. Phil (44m 14s): Remember to use your countdown, don’t just chuck it and chance it be methodical with your presentation. So when you get that fish, you can remember what the heck you were doing just before you hooked it so you can duplicate it if you can quarter your cast out there, fan cast don’t always cover the same water straight out in front of you. If you’re by yourself, imagine a clock in front of you. Nine o’clock to your left, say three o’clock to your right, you are going to fan those casts around to every hour or half hour and cover your water as much water as you can. You got a vast expanse of water out there. Don’t make it harder for yourself by just casting in a single channel straight out in front of you. Pull ’em around, always keep them like that. Phil (44m 56s): ’cause if you’ve got, one of the things about fanning off on a diagonal is fish typically like to feed or move upwind. So as you’re pulling your fly across through the water, it’s gonna have a, I think a bigger profile. It’s gonna be easier to see and get a better reaction. San Juan Rod Works (45m 13s): If you’ve been holding off on getting a new fly rod because of the price tag San Juan Rod works, just change the game. These rods are dialed in with the right action, clean design and built to fish hard without the high price tag. Whether you’re stripping streamers, tight lining or dead drift andries, they’ve got a setup that feels right from the first cast. And the best part is you can try any rod reel or fly line for 30 days risk free. And if you’re not 100% satisfied, you can send it back for a full refund. Check ’em out right now. That’s San Juan Rod works.com. S-A-N-J-U-A-N rod works.com. You support this podcast by checking in with San Juan. Dave (45m 53s): Now Phil (45m 56s): When working structure like drop offs and points, I like to try and present my flies parallel or close to parallel to those features as I can fish. Love to cruise around the edge of points across over the top or on that transition from shallow to deep water. And if you can keep your flies in areas that they are cruising along and through, you’re just gonna have a better chance of catching them. And if you do get the grab, it’s different than fishing floating lines where you can just do a rod raise to set the hook. If you try that with a sinking line, you’re not gonna be able to get any pressure on your flies and set that hook into the fish’s mouth. Phil (46m 36s): You need to strip strike. So when you are feeling a fish, take the fly. You keep stripping until that fish pulls back and then you could even pinch that line against the cork of course to stop the line from moving and pull that rod back by bending your elbow, pulling it back or sweeping side sweeping, rotating at the hips and set that hook into the fish’s mouth that way because what typically happens is that fish grabs the fly and turns and by you strip striking like this, you are going to pull that fly into the corner of their mouth into the scissors it’s often referred to. And that’s a great hook set if you do the dryly set. Phil (47m 17s): And I’m sure if any of you have ever streamer fished on a river after fishing a lot of dry flies and you get the grab, you sort of instinctively wanna raise the rod and your guide will or your buddy, whoever will chastise you for the trout set. Remember that strip set? I still have trouble with it, especially when I travel and and fish for Golden Colorado for example. Very aggressive fish fishing streamers. It usually takes me a little while ’cause I fish a lot of floating lines in lakes to stop that trout set and get into the habit of strip setting aggressively and really stick sticking that fish. ’cause it’s, you’ve worked so hard to get the grab, you don’t wanna lose it on the strike. Alright, one of the things, another trick here you can do with sinking lines is reducing the tangle. Phil (47m 59s): The faster a sink line sinks the thinner it gets. And of course the thinner it gets, the more tangled prone it gets. I’m sure we’ve all tangled leaders and tip it. The fine stuff just finds ways to tangle that you can’t believe. So some things you can do here to help alleviate tangles. If you are in a boat, for example, you can put a collapsible, you can get these gardening buckets, a collapse down when they’re not in use or a go to a dollar store and get a cheap little basket and put some water, a little skim of water, maybe no more than a half, three eighths of an inch or even less just to make a little bit of water. And when you’re stripping the line, you’re putting that line into that basket and the water helps keep it all apart and tangle free. Phil (48m 44s): If you’re in a boat or a pontoon boat, obviously it’s tough to put a bucket in there with you. Take a hand towel with you, put it in the water, get it wet, wring it out, lay it out on the apron and strip your line onto that damp towel. Dry line is more prone to tangling than wet line. You can get some great stripping baskets nowadays as well. I use one that’s the flexi stripper, it’s like a V-shaped flat piece of plastic with little plastic supple fingers coming up through and you just strip the line into there, all lays apart and when you go to cast, it just lays in there and casts really nice. So I do like to use that a lot when I’m fishing for things other than trout like pike for example, where you’re making long casts and you wanna just keep all that line tangle free, whether you’re fishing, sinking lines or floating lines. Phil (49m 34s): And always remember and it particularly with faster sink rate lines, when you’re going to make your first cast, just don’t strip off a bunch of line and start casting. ’cause often it will tangle when you go to shoot. And the reason being is if you just strip the line off and pilot at your feet or on your apron or in your bucket, the front of the line is on the bottom of the pile. So when you go to make your final cast and shoot that line to the target, that front of the line is trying to work its way up through the pile and sort of somersaults and gets all tangled up. So what you wanna do is you strip your line off like you would, but before you make your first cast, strip that line back through your forefinger against the cork and re pile it, right? Phil (50m 17s): So now the end of the line that is on the bottom of the pile and the tip of the line is on the top. So when you finish your two or three falls casts and let her go, it’s going to, the line is going to come off that pile front to back and gonna tangle way less or not at all. So remember to pile that line from the bottom of the line or the end of the line, if you will, that came off the reel to the tip of the line that sits on top of the pile. Now one of the most important things when you’re fishing any still water presentation, but particularly with sinking lines, is a technique known as the hang. So at the end of the retrieve we often pick the fly line up to cast again, and that’s where we’re going going to get the grab. Phil (51m 2s): We’re gonna see a flash of color or silver depending on the species of the trout, or get that tug and miss it and get startled by it. What happened there? Well that trout was probably following your fly for a while, interested but not committed. And when you raise the rod to cast again, you accelerate the fly and you change its direction. And that triggers what is often referred to as a flea response where the trout now sees that thing, it’s interested in getting away and instinctively wants to grab it. So what we’re gonna do with the hang, after we get near the end of the retrieve, we are going to raise the rod and I actually drop my hands apart and still gather line to keep tension as I raise the rod and see if any fish are falling, we’re gonna raise that rod up until the fly or flies each hang at or just below the surface. Phil (51m 55s): This is where the long rods we like to use in still water fishing come in the hang is one of the benefits of using rods that are nine and a half 10 or even greater than 10 feet long. You get just a superior hang with those long rods. You can raise the rod fast, you can raise the rod slow, you can pause the fly at the surface for a few seconds or more than five or 10 seconds. I recall one time on Henry’s leg pausing a fly for a good 15 to 20 seconds before recasting and a Yellowstone cut came up out of the wee bed and took that mayfly. And if I was fishing at the time right below the surface, oftentimes because you’re under tension, as that fish comes up to take the fly, it almost sets the hook itself. Phil (52m 38s): This is probably when it comes to Stillwater fly fishing, the number one way to jump your catch rate by as much as 20 30% by fishing the hang. So experiment with it. Slow raises fast, raises long pauses, short pauses. Now the trick with this is how do You know you’re near the end of the retrieve When you are using a floating line or a mid tip, you’ve got that visible section of the line you can see on the water and you can see the star. You know where the fly landed from the end of the line all the way back to the rod tip, You know exactly where you are in the retrieve. When the line is under the surface and the sinking lines are dark, generally the darker the line, the faster it’s sinking. Phil (53m 17s): It’s tough to know where the end of the line is. So years ago we used to put markers on the line. We used to mark our lines using a high vis or a a vibrant color tying thread. We literally hold the tag end of the, of the thread on the line and carefully spin the bobbin. And with a little bit of practice you can get that bobin to wrap around the fly line in adjacent wraps and make a marker on your line about an inch or so long. And then you’d kinda whip finish the end of the line. The thread rather like you would finish a guide on a rod trim, the ends little bit of super glue little coating over top like an aquae not sense or another one to try is, is clear gorilla glue that you can get at any home improvement store like Home Depot and coat that line. Phil (54m 4s): It’s a visual clue cue rather. And it’s also one you feel because you’ll feel that line bump through your fingers. And we used to typically set them about 20 feet from the end of the line. Now manufacturers do it today for you. Many of the higher end sinking lines have hang markers and even some floating lines nowadays have hang markers built into them. The ones I work with real, we chose them at 20 feet because first of all, if you’ve got 20 feet of line outside of your rod for casting purposes, you have enough massive line outside of the tip to effectively load or bend the rod so you can cast properly. Phil (54m 44s): If you bring line inside that range, you don’t have enough line out to effectively load the rod. It makes casting much more difficult and you tend to increase the speed of your casting stroke, which causes all kinds of problems and tailing loops and tangled and frustration. So that’s one of the benefits. The other benefit of having your hang marker at 20 feet is using the long rods. We like to use those nine and a half, 10 foot or even longer rods. I have the opportunity to, when that hang marker hits the tip, I can hang it there. I could hang it halfway down the rod or I could hang the line start that hang pro technique When that marker hits my thumb and forefinger down at the bottom of the rod, typically leader length dictates this. Phil (55m 26s): Shorter leaders, I’m gonna tend to hang that line a little further out towards the tip because of the short leader length. Longer leaders I have the luxury of bringing it back a little bit and hanging the rod back there. You’re gonna experiment with this all the time. The other benefit of a hang marker and we’ll get to when we talk about dangling in a second is once you set your depth for fishing vertically, you just pay attention to which guide that hang marker was adjacent to. And if you catch a fish and it takes a little bit of line and you wanna reset, you just look which guide it was and make sure that the guide is adjacent to that and that’s how much line you’re gonna use in that presentation. It’ll make a little more sense in a second when I talk about dangling a bit. Phil (56m 7s): The other thing we do a lot of times with sinking lines and with mid tips, you can certainly do it with floating lines, is a technique called the washing line. And the washing line is a presentation technique where you have a buoyant fly in the point position that you use to hold up other flies typically lightly weighted or unweighted off independent dropper tags. So the buoyant fly in conjunction with the line you’ve chosen suspends those flies so they hang like clothes off a washing line. It is a way of controlling the depth of your presentation in a horizontal manner. Not dissimilar to how we use indicators to suspend a flight at a certain depth in a vertical manner. Phil (56m 50s): It is a deadly technique. I use it all the time whether I’m fishing, midge tips, hovers, clear intermediates, even type seven lines. You could put a booby on the point, a fab a spun and clip deer hair dragon, a foam based dragon that may have foam eyeballs, a foam wing case, a foam underbody and allow that fly to hold up and hold those other flies up out of trouble or You know, get that nice depth control so we can track our flies through a set depth. So the washing line is a really key technique that we can use with sinking lines, but all lines for that matter, buoyant flies are increasingly popular nowadays. I’ve mentioned those a few times in this podcast. Phil (57m 32s): We’re talking boobies, fabs spun and clipped deer hair dragons. These are not dry flies but they are flies tied with a lot of buoyant materials. These are an excellent fly to use with sinking lines. When you’re fishing in weedy areas or over rock piles or different debris you can use. Again, your attractor flies or imitative flies with this method, you’re basically using that sinking line to drag the fly down. And so the line could lay on the bottom or over the rock pile. It’s probably not gonna snag up and your fly because it’s buoyant, will rise up a little bit and just work its way over the top and allow you to present your fly in those nasty places. Phil (58m 16s): Fish like to cruise and feed, it’s a lot of fun on clear lakes at times too. You can see these fish moving. You could be fishing in less than 10 feet of water, see that fish moving, anticipate its direction, place your cast well ahead of it, allow that line to sink. And when the fish comes into view, then start to move it. You know, sometimes your fly might have settled a little bit just above the bottom and when you start stripping it creates a very natural, realistic puff of marl or sand or mud off the bottom. And that’s a trigger to a fish that that’s food and they come over and eat it. So a very exciting because you’ll see that fish just veer off its cruise path and come over and clock the fly if there’s multiple fish cruising in a pod, because fish tend to be competitive in that situation, you can almost be assured to get a grab because they’re like siblings. Phil (59m 6s): They want what the other one is chasing as well. So it’s a lot of fun to fish those flies. So buoyant flies under. Using sinking lines is another excellent tactic to think about. Okay, I mentioned in the intro about getting deep. How do you get flies down? You know, I do hosted trips to lots of different lodges in northern Canada. Gangler is one a great opportunity to catch lake trout on the fly. I’ve had the pleasure of fishing great Bear lake with plumbers, lodges and fishing for lake trout and and lake trout to me on their fly are a bit like steelhead fishing. You know, you could argue the fly rod is the or a cast and retrieve fly is not the best presentation technique. Phil (59m 46s): These lake trout love to follow the fly or allure for long distances before committing. And of course with a cast and strip technique, you just don’t get that long technique. I’ve, I’ve talked to guides, it says they’ve put underwater cameras on their lines when they’re trolling and have watched huge lake trout follow the fly for 5, 10, 15 minutes before finally something flips in their head and and they decide to take the lure or fly with a cast and retrieve. We don’t get that benefit. So it’s a little more challenging. But part of the times we fly fishes, we like those challenges. It makes it kind of fun. So lake trout are known for residing deep spring and fall when the before the water temperatures get too warm they’ll stay in the shallows. Phil (1h 0m 28s): But once those shallow temperatures warm up lake trout, like all char like cool oxygenated water and they’ll find that in the deeper regions and in the fall months you can get them shallow because they come in around rock piles and reefs and things like that to gather to spawn. You can get ’em then a lot more easier. But what do you do if you’re a destination and they’re 40, 50, 60, 70 feet down? How can you do that? Well how I like to do it and you can do it lock style as well where you deploy a drug, an underwater parachute to slow and control your drift. Or you can work with whoever’s running the boat a guide or a friend. And on a light wind day you’re trying to get that boat to drift at the same rate as it’s naturally drifting or even almost tread water if you will. Phil (1h 1m 12s): And What I like to do is cast downwind as far as I comfortably can. I’ve stripped off additional line and as soon as that line lands, I let it sink a little bit and I start a series of of roll casts if you will, to stack men and pile the line on top of itself and just allow it to free fall down through the water until it gets to a near vertical or vertical presentation and then aggressively strip the fly up through the water. And those lake trout, they’re every bit as aggressive as a northern pike. They like to eat and they eat aggressively and you’ll see them, they’ll either take the fly within a couple of strips or follow it right up to the surface. And I’ll tell you, when you see a trout 12, 15, 20 pounds or greater coming up out of the gloom right behind your fly, it can be a little heart stopping to say the least. Phil (1h 2m 1s): So very fun method. We’re using weighted flies when we do this to help get down short leaders. I’m probably using no more than seven and a half, nine feet maybe in in clear situations. A lot of times it’s a level leader. I like to always put a break point or a fusible link if you will. So I’ll have differing braking strains along that leader length, maybe two sections. So if I do end up, you can hook the bottom of this method or You know, get broken off. It’s not gonna break off at your fly line, it’s gonna break off at your fly or the connection between those two sections of tip it that you use to build up your leader. But this method works very well. Phil (1h 2m 42s): I’ve had a lot of success with it and I now take my sinking lines like the sinking lines I use for this. One of my favorites is Rio’s outbound short type seven line. It’s a great casting line but it does not come with hang markers. So I have put them on myself. I used to use a Dacron line markers you can put on but now there are companies that offer a line repair kit that you can put a section of line and careful use of almost like a heat shrink tubing material. You can create a very smooth line marker on your rod line rather. Phil (1h 3m 24s): And a company called Restore Line has this product and you can build these line markers. So I put a marker at 20 feet, at 40 feet at 60 feet. So typically when we’re doing this deep water method, we are using electronics to help us identify where the fish are. We’re, we’re obviously gonna try and put our fly where we see fish cruising or bait balls where a predatory lake trout might be lurking. And if there are 40 feet down and 80 feet of water, I know to make sure that I cast enough that that 40 foot marker is just outside the rod tip factoring in a a five to seven foot liter. I know my flies are getting down to that depth so you can get down deep with that. Phil (1h 4m 6s): It’s, You know, in between cask can be a little slow at times but that aggressive take that a lake trout when it takes to fly and you are fighting that fish right underneath the boat with a long limber fly rod. You’re in for one challenging fight and it’s a blast to be able to catch a fish in a scenario that most other non fly anglers would think a fly fisherman is just totally out of their element. You can do that. Okay, the other method I’ve mentioned is dangling. I nickname this the social way to fish because most, so many other presentation techniques we use when we’re still water fishing all about staring at indicator or watching a line for signs of movement. All this stuff we can stare at the stars, have conversations with our friends because we are fishing vertically with a fast sinking line to catch fish. Phil (1h 4m 55s): And the takes with this method are savage. So typically we’re going to do this, we’re gonna fish deep water, typically greater than 20 feet. I have done it shallower when the water clarity isn’t that great. This is an op, a presentation technique that works best from once the lake has turned over in the spring. And trout are free to disperse over different depths through until the fall month. So this is good from late spring right through until early fall when trout can still be in 2030 feet of water. It’s also a great method if it’s really windy or bright, clear conditions where trout may be reluctant to venture into the shallows to feed. It’s great on a windy day because we are not making any long distance cast at all. Phil (1h 5m 39s): You can almost throw the line over the side of your boat, float tube or pontoon boat to fish this method. This is the kind of thing you may be moving from one shallow area to another. You go over a deep stretch of water and all of a sudden there’s birds working everywhere. There’s clearly some kind of hatch going on. You look on the water and you see ate shucks. This is where this method was first developed was fishing, ate emergencies in deep water where fishing long leaders or strike indicator setups with long distances between indicator and flies was challenging and problematic. We are fishing fast sinking lines, we are fishing short leaders typically five feet long. A section of three foot section of two x connected to a two foot section of three x or four x depending on water clarity. Phil (1h 6m 27s): And we connect those by a double triple surgeons, not a tip ring or more often a small barrel swivel to add a little bit of weight and try and get that vertical presentation. ’cause what we’re doing with this method is we’re fishing from an anchored position, right? We are not drifting, we are anchored and we are casting out enough line and leader. So our fly sits suspends or as we call it dangles, about a foot off the bottom and stays there and we let that sit there for as long as we can take it. And if it starts to get boring, the cure for boredom, one of the knocks against still water fly fishing is it can be boring, is move the fly, stay engaged. Phil (1h 7m 9s): Because if you start to get bored, your attention starts to wane, you’re going to miss things, you’re gonna miss fish. So we’re gonna let it sit there for as long as we can and then once we get bored, move the fly, start creeping that fly back up to the surface until that leader and line connection is right at the rod tip and pick it up and cast again. Now the takes with this method are savage. The one thing about this method is you never ever, ever, ever, ever let go of the rod. Do not lay the rod on the bench of your boat or cross the apron of your float tube or pontoon boat because if you get a take it’s gone. I have had, I know of two or three friends of mine that have, You know, thought they could get away with it, put the rod down for a second to do something or grab something and bam, that’s when the fish hits and it’s gone and it’s over the side of the boat and you’re never gonna see it again. Phil (1h 7m 59s): So if you’ve gotta let go of the rod, get somebody else to hold it or put it in a rod holder, if your float, your watercraft allows for that. So, or if you gotta do something, bring the line in, do your thing and then put it back in the water again. I hate to see you lose a rod. This is not only a method for trout, I also dangle in the summer months around where I live in Alberta, our lakes, our trout lakes often get quite warm and we, You know, I still wanna fish but it’s not the right thing to do is fish for trout and those high water temperatures because of the the oxygen content just isn’t there. You’re gonna stress the fish out. But walleye also are quite active at that time. We have many good walleye lakes around and when other fly anglers are, sorry, other fishermen rather conventional anglers are fishing jigs and minnows and jigs in 20, 25, 30 feet of water adjacent to structure or over a big main lake basin. Phil (1h 8m 54s): I can mark those fish on my sounder. I can anchor up and I can dangle leach patterns and balance minnow patterns right off the bottom and catch a lot of walla as well. Do I catch as many as a guy with a jig and a minnow? No, probably not ’cause it’s tough to beat natural bait but I can still catch fish and I’m using the same five and six weight systems I use for trout for walleye. It’s a lot of fun You know, and you run into a bunch of ’em and it’s a great way to keep your, to catch fish of course and and keep your skills up for when you can get back on the water when the water temperature’s cooler and trout fish. So how the heck do we know we’re gonna hang our fly a foot off the bottom? How do we do that? Well what we do is you take a weight like a forceps or a a depth locator, we use those mine and Brian’s online store. Phil (1h 9m 42s): We sell the the depth locators as well. And what we do is we clip this weight onto our fly carefully so we don’t damage it and lower it over the side and let that just keep feeding line off, feeding line off. It’s gonna pull all that line out and eventually hit the bottom and everything will go slack. And I’m gonna put my rod in What I call the fishing position. I’m gonna have my rod typically three to four inches off the surface how I’m gonna fish it. And then I’m going to start, once I’ve got that rod in tip in position, I’m gonna start reeling in the fly line very slowly and it’s just gonna start reeling in, reeling in. And all of a sudden you’re gonna pick that weight up off the bottom and that rod tip is gonna dip down noticeably almost like you feel like you gotta fish or something on there. Phil (1h 10m 25s): What has happened is as you’ve reeled in, now that weight that’s attached to your fly is just touching the bottom. And then I’m going to reach up ’cause I want to be about a foot off the bottom. I’m gonna reach up in front of my reel about one foot, pull that back under my forefinger reel, that little bit of slack in, strip the line in, take the weight off, make a short cast and allow it to sink straight down so it hangs vertically or dangles right beneath the rod tip. And you’re just gonna let it sit there again for as long as you can. And if you get bored, start retrieving. A lot of times the takes with this method typically occur just off the bottom or just as the fly gets near the surface, the fish will follow it up. Phil (1h 11m 6s): And as it gets into brighter and brighter water, that fish has gotta make a decision. So again, this is a fun method to fish. It’s if you’re fishing with somebody that can’t cast in deeper water, You know I had my mother who is in her late eighties, my wife would know this better, maybe even into her nineties. And she’d never caught a fish before. She came for a visit one summer we took her out onto a local walleye lake, she couldn’t cast, we were fishing 20 to 30 feet down. I could mark the walleye on my sounder. I set her up, she dangled a bait fish pattern under the dangled using the sinking line technique dangling with a fast sinking line. I just set her up, she held the rod and got fish and she had a blast. Phil (1h 11m 50s): Never caught a fish before. She caught lots of walleye doing this. So it’s a great technique and again the takes are savage. Sometimes you’ll see the rod tip drop down, they’re not always savage but most of them just about rip the rod outta your hands. So never ever, ever let go of the rod ow it reel it in. If you gotta do something but never just leave it sitting there because you could be in for a very expensive life lesson. So I’ve touched on lock style a bit. I’m going to have, we’ve had Devin Olson on here, we’ve had Tom Jarman. These are competitive anglers that use lock style techniques. I encourage you to check out those podcasts. Again, I’ll put the links to their podcasts in the show notes as well where we touched on lock style technique. Phil (1h 12m 34s): But if you haven’t listened to those, lock style is You know, successful Stillwater presentations are all based on boat control. If you have control of what you’re fishing out of, then you can better deal with the presentation challenges and the fish. If you’re always fighting your boat ’cause it’s not doing or your watercraft your pontoon boat or your float tube, it’s not doing what you want, it gets very frustrating and you spend more time dealing with your boat than you do fishing. So three sort of four forms of of presentation control. If you’re fishing from the bank, you’re under control, your presentation ’cause you are not moving. If you’re anchored in a boat, you’re under control of your presentation ’cause the boat isn’t moving. If you are trolling, you control the boat which allows you to control and maintain your presentation or you can fish lock style. Phil (1h 13m 16s): Now lock style originated over in Europe. It’s very popular in the United Kingdom, England. It’s controlled drift. So you are drifting perpendicular to the wind, the wind at your back being pushed down wind. Now you need to control the boat. If you don’t have any method or device to control how the boat drifts because the bow is lighter, it’s gonna swing down wind and if there’s two people in the boat, obviously that’s gonna get in the way ’cause you’re gonna be sitting tandem one behind the other and that’s not gonna work out very well for long. So what we use is an underwater parachute called a drug that we deploy that opens up inflates with water and slows and controls the drift, allowing you to drift perpendicular to the wind. Phil (1h 14m 1s): Again, common practice in Europe, it’s when you, if you get into fly fishing competitions, that’s how you have to fish lakes ’cause it allows everybody to have fair opportunity to fish all the water. If you’re anchored, you could conceivably sit on a spot and hog that spot. But the other benefits of this is you’re, you’re moving water, you’re covering fish and you’re, because your flies land ahead of you when you drift. Unlike trolling where you proceed the flies, the fish are always seeing the flies first and not you. And because in windy conditions, as I mentioned earlier, trout often like to feed up wind, you are putting flies down into them. So you have this nice interception between fly and predator in the form of a fish. Phil (1h 14m 42s): So the fly always proceeds the fly fisher and you’re always presenting your flies to fresh fish. This is an excellent method to use on large shoals when you’re drifting over deep water where the fish could be anywhere and to anchor up, You know, in deep water it’s not even safe or practical ’cause it’s, you could be an 80 feet of water. I don’t have 80 feet of anchor open my boats rarely. That’s not to say we haven’t dangled in deep water before like that, but the fish tender meander and crews. So this is a way to deal with that. So very effective method. It’s great on shoals along the edges of drop-offs. You know when you’ve anchored and that’s not working and you need to cover water and find fish lock style is great for that. Phil (1h 15m 23s): You could drift through an area and you consistently hit fish in this one spot, then you could come out and perhaps anchor on that spot and work that spot a little more carefully. But it’s a great method to use anytime. It’s just the more, to me, the more presentation tricks and techniques you can add to your kit bag, the better your experience is gonna be on the water, the more you’re gonna have. So the these droves, again, we’ll do an episode on this in the future in detail. You can get two kinds. There’s the European para drove. You can order those online providers through Amazon. I mentioned Devin Olson, his fly shop online fly store. Tactical fly fisher sells them or you can order them from Europe. Phil (1h 16m 4s): The one most common you see out there is Winwood, W-I-N-C-H-O-O-D. It’s called a perro. It’s rectangular. It has two attachment points. This is the one I like to use on a boat because when I deploy it, it kind of self centers. We use clamps like a sea clamp or G clamp or a spring loaded clamp. We place that clamp on the gunnel on the upwind side, 12 to 18 inches from the bow and again from the stern. When we deploy that over the side of the boat, it’s gonna inflate because it’s got the two attachment points. It’s gonna self center lock up and that boat’s gonna drift square. The other more commonly available type of drug or the sea anchor or drift sock, you can get at a BassPro or Cabela’s or conical in nature, they have a single attachment point. Phil (1h 16m 50s): So I don’t prefer to use those in boats because you’ve got to find the balance point on that boat to do this. And that takes a bit of experimentation. But I do like to use the conical anchors. When I’m drifting out of a pontoon boat, I just attach it to the rear frame. Typically there’s a, an anchor cleat or an electric motor mount there. Attach it to that, deploy it out behind you. Yes, you may have to do the odd kick of your fins or your oars to keep the boat drifting square. But again, the beauty of this method lock style is you just get to cover so much water in front of you. Fish could be anywhere and you have an opportunity to to cover anywhere and it’s a great technique with not only floating lines but especially with sinking line techniques. Phil (1h 17m 32s): So we’ve covered a lot here today. We’ve covered why and when you’d want to use sinking lines. Again, the whys your horizontal retrieve path. Shorter leaders, if it’s windy conditions when fishing, long leader techniques with mid tips or floating lines or indicators is impractical because of the surface chop and its negative impact on the fly line or just trying to cast those longer leader systems in wind. Those sinking lines are ideal for that. When you’re fishing deeper water or you or fisher down deep and you need to go down and get ’em sinking lines off in your only option. We talk about all the different sinking lines. We talked about intermediate lines, hover lines, clear intermediate lines, your sort of, You know, faster sinking lines, your type threes, your type fives, your type sevens. Phil (1h 18m 16s): Again the type number refers to typically the how much that line sinks in inches per second, which we can use to our advantage. So type five would sync at five inches per second, a type four at four inches per second and so on. Always check the manufacturer’s sync rates either through their website or on the boxes when you get them on the box art on the back or on the that small text we never read. Kinda like our software licensing agreements when we update our software we just click, I understand or I agree and move on and broke ’em into three types. I recommend you have a clear intermediate, perhaps a type three and a type seven and then fill in the blanks after that. And one of the blanks we talked about are the sweep lines. Phil (1h 18m 58s): These are lines that are designed with differing syn rates along the length like a two inch per second inch and a half per second tip section, A type seven midsection and a type four back section. This allows you to retrieve your fly through a U-shaped path and that’s ideal for fishing into deep water. That’s where I like to use it off drop-offs, off points or when lock styling and drifting over deep water where fish, even though that water may be 60, 80 feet deep, they may only be suspending 12, 15, 20 feet down or stacked up like aircraft at a busy airport waiting for their turn to land. Phil (1h 19m 38s): You can sweep your flies through all those different depths to find fish and pay attention to where you’re getting your takes with those lines. If they’re coming early in the retrieve when the fly is still up in the water that tells you the fish are, may be a little higher in the water than you think. Conversely, if you’re getting your retrieves sort of ladder part before the line swings back up to the tip before you recast, then the fish are deeper. And again, you can adapt your techniques after getting that information and choose a a line or a technique that allows you to better target that area where you suspect most of the fish to be. We talked about density compensation, a feature you’ll find on the higher end sinking lines where they have adjusted, how the line sinks so it sinks in a tip first manner allowing you better bite detection. Phil (1h 20m 21s): Again, these are things that you’re going to find on your more expensive lines. We talked about leader considerations, generally shorter leaders with sinking lines. Of course when you add multiple flies, everything lengthens out typically on cast and retrieve. I like to have my flies anywhere from three to five feet apart. The clear the water, the greater I spread ’em out. But You know, generally, You know, if you’re fishing hovers, clear intermediates, I’m gonna probably have liters anywhere from nine. If the water’s kind of murky and I’m not worried about separation between my line and my fly so much or up to 12, 14 feet with a type three line, I might have about seven and a half feet and with a type five or seven I might have a liter as short as five feet. Phil (1h 21m 7s): And those short leaders, obviously you can’t buy liters that long. We make those up out of tippet sections and connect them together to make that maybe three feet of two x and two feet of three x to make a five foot liter. Connect those by a triple surgeons, not a tippet ring or a barrel swivel. Again, the longer the leader, the slower the sink rate. And if you’re new to, to fishing longer leaders in fly fishing, still water fly fishing, one of the best ways I know is start with like a seven and a half foot tapered leader and add, tip it from there. You allows you to get your leader out there and get those longer leaders that we may need from time to time. But you’ve got a little bit of backbone in that leader to help turn things over. Phil (1h 21m 48s): So you’ve got a leader that both cast and performs well with you. And then as you get more used to fishing longer leaders, then you can go down to those level leaders that I mentioned earlier that provide, allow you to keep, again the whole thing with our leader setup is making sure that our flies are in the same vicinity as our sinking line. We wanna make sure, because we use, one of the things we talked about in the tactics was the countdown method where we count our flies down to a depth and try and target that depth. Remember depth retrieve pattern. DRP, getting your flies at the right depth is the most important. And the countdown techniques, we talked about the five count and the rule of twelves. Your five count, when you’re unsure of the depth you’re fishing into, you just start from the, the top of the lake to the top of the water to the bottom of the water, five seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, et cetera, until you either hit bottom or catch fish. Phil (1h 22m 37s): If You know the depth of water, that’s where you use the rule of twelves. 12 inches in a foot. Take your syn rate of your line, divide it into the number 12. So for example, a type three line, it sinks at three inches per second. Three into 12 is four seconds. It’s gonna take that line, four seconds to sink one foot if I wanna go down to 10 feet. 10 times four is 40 seconds. You’re gonna let that line sink I said approximately because there are factors that influence sink rate like water density. If you’re fishing weighted flies or multiple flies or longer cast, there’s gonna be more sinking line in the water that’s gonna accelerate the sink a little bit. But again, we are just trying to get into a system that we’re not chucking and chancing it. We have a bit of our method to our madness. Phil (1h 23m 19s): So we, when we hook a fish, we can repeat what we did to hook another one. Other things we talked about rod tip in the surface. So you have that direct connection strip setting, don’t use that dry line sweep that set you use with indicators you wanna strip, set or sway that You know, move that rod briskly horizontally to get the butt section into the strike and drive that hook home. We talked about the hang where we are using that rod raise to induce a following fish to take the fly. You can do a fast raise, a slow raise, you can pause the fly at or just below the surface for a few seconds or even longer. You experiment with it till you find out what the fish want. But single-handedly, if you take one thing out of today’s talk is the hang will add 20 to 30% to your catch rate ’cause you’re not gonna miss those fish that fall to fly. Phil (1h 24m 7s): And then you pull it out of the way to cast again before that fish had a chance to commit at the end of the retrieve. We talked about dangling fishing flies vertically, great for aramids and deep water, but also great for other species like walleye where you wanna fish a balanced minnow or a balanced leach just off the bottom as well. Works great for that. We talked about some UN methods to keep still water lines from tangling using a basket or a bucket with a skim of water or a wet towel if you’re in a float tube or a pontoon boat. And you obviously can’t have a, a bucket or a basket in there with you. We touched on lock style a little bit as well. Again, we’ll do a more in-depth episode on that in the future. Phil (1h 24m 48s): But that’s used. Fishing from a drifting boat using an underwater parachute or a what we call a drove to slow and control your drift. Great technique to cover a lot of water, great to use over a large shoal parallel to drop offs over deeper water where the fish aren’t holding or relating to any one piece of structure. They’re, You know, cruising and rambling about. You can cover a lot of water and catch and it’s just a fun method to fish. The more I do it, the more I enjoy it. So I think I touched on everything there. If I haven’t, obviously go back and have a listen. But thank you for taking the time to spend with me today to learn a little bit more about how sinking lines and how I like to use them. If you wanna learn more about this, I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to pick up my orvis guide to Stillwater trout fishing. Phil (1h 25m 33s): I’ll put links in the show notes as well. There’s a whole section on sinking lines and and and sinking line tactics in that book, along with a lot of other great Stillwater information that I put together to hopefully make you enjoy Stillwaters more. And of course you can reach out to me anytime you want through my website as well. You can join my mailing list if you haven’t already, check out additional podcast episodes. Don’t be afraid to visit mine and Brian’s Stillwater fly fishing store at stillwater fly fishing store.com. We’ve got everything you need if you’re a devoted Stillwater Fisher or would like to get more into Stillwater. So until next time, thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Phil (1h 26m 18s): I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and found the content helpful. The next time you decide to use a sinking line, I hope you’ll feel more confident about which one to choose and how to use it. If you wanna learn more about sinking lines and fly lines in general, I suggest checking out my two part series on making sense of still water fly lines. And the episode I recorded with Chris Walker from Rio Products Stillwater, flylines leaders and TPEs, I’ll sure be leaving links to these episodes in the show notes. Until next time, I hope you get out on the water and enjoy Stillwater fly fishing as much as I do.