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."