Quote Originally Posted by whatfly View Post
Huh? I hope someone with more time and patience will respond to this, but until then my comment would be that I'm not sure you are thinking about this the right way. Consider that when Galloup wrote his book, he was using full sink lines with unweight flies. Fast forward to today, and he is advocating shooting head style lines with long heads (e.g. "his" SA line has a 50' head) with weighted articulated flies. So if you were going to try to emulate Galloup's method, especially with unweight streamers like the Zoo Cougar, by using a VERY short head on a Versatip with its built in 19' WF floating head you might not get down fast enough to do much good, in many situations (perhaps not all).

Another issue is line weight. The Versi-Tip was designed to match the prescribed heads to meet the recommended line weight. Cut up the heads, and you are messing with those calcuations. No idea why you would want to use a lighter head to throw big bugs. Furthermore a shorter head won't hold the bottom as well making your presentations that much shorter.

So with what you have, I would argue that the heaviest 15' tip is your best choices UNALTERED, although they might not be the best solution for what you actually want to do. Very hard to make a definitive judgement without a better idea of the water you will fish, but I'm guessing they are not too disimiliar from the waters I know, so you might want consider making some heads out of some very fast sink line, like T-14. You can buy it by the foot at most shops, and you can then rig heads longer than you 15', and shorter if you really find that necessary. You may to experiment to see what you can throw comfortably, but with the distances you will be throwing, a little overlining won't hurt.

All that being said, I do know folks who are quite successful with short heads of T-14 on floating lines (6/8/10') but in those cases, they are using heavily WEIGHTED streamers on standard WF floating lines so the "heads" are overlining their rods (typically fast to very fast) but for the distances cast, this is not too much of a problem. Good luck with your experiment.
Thanks for taking the time to respond and your insight. BTW - I didn't read Galloup's book. I received his two videos on streamer fishing. In it, I believe he said (perhaps I misheard him) that he used unweighted flies. He might have been referring to some specific ones because in checking out some of his patterns like the Peanut Envy and Sex Dungeon they have coneheads or lead eyes.

I've checked out the tapers on more than a few streamer lines and it may be that I'll just go with picking up a dedicated streamer line with a sink-tip.