Question for Tom Deschanine

Tom,


Great story. The "no nail knot" connection is of personal interest to me: All too often during fish retrieves I will pull in my floating line to the extent that the glued nail knot connecting my floating line with the heavy monofilament butt section will collide with the tip-top guide. I have a bad feeling that the day will come when this impact will snap off my tip-top guide altogether. Or worse.

So your no-nail-knot connector definitely would solve that problem.

Since you have used the no-nail-knot for many years now, I'm curious how you deal with the chronic loss of leader length at the tippet's terminal end. After all, each time you tie on a new fly you're eating up two or three inches of tippet.

After completing your no-nail-knot do you lengthen the newly installed tapered leader by surgeon knotting extra tippet to the factory tippet's end?

I don't know about you, but in my experience the length of a factory tapered leader gets eaten up pretty quickly due to fish breakoffs, snag breakoffs and tying knots during fly pattern switches.

How do you deal with this unavoidable loss? Because it seems to me that if the no-nail-knot-connected leaders get eaten up too quick then you're in an equally bad situation -- where you are constantly using a fresh glued knot...and after awhile you're eating up the length of your floating line, too. (Well, I would do that, as much leader length as I devour during a typical fishing trip.)


Joe
"Better small than not at all."

Joe,
I'm not Tom, but I've been using his method for twelve years or so. In fact I have a full-sink line on a reel that has the first super-glue connection I ever did, and that connection and line are still going strong after all that time. On my leader, I use a small loop-to-loop connection where the tippet hooks, and the leader remains the same length, and as I've stated, the line to leader connection has never been changed. I've never had a glue connection failure, on all the lines that I've used it. Tying leader on with a nail knot takes more of your line, when you replace a leader, than the glue-knot. The only drawback I've found, is that it's more labor intensive to glue, than to knot, when you're on the stream.

Thanks, Lew,


Let me check if I've got this right, because I'm still a bit confused:

You use the "glue knot" to connect your tapered leader to the end of your floating line...and the loop connection you speak of is located way down at the end of your tapered leader?

In other words, you extend the length of your glue-knotted tapered leader by using sacrificial lengths of tippet material that you loop-connect to the factory leader's tippet. Do I have that right?


Joe