Quote Originally Posted by fritz View Post
Anyone have experience using fluorocarbon instead of "regular" mono leader material for dries? If fluoro is designed to sink fast because if its greater density than the obvious answer is to use mono for dries. There is a cost savings and I have read of both applications.

Appreciate your thoughts and experience.
fritz -

I don't use fluoro leaders or tippet for dry flies because I intentionally use thread furled leaders that submerge with mono tippet that also submerges but don't sink even small dry flies, like down to size 18. I've been using this combination for 19 years and have caught many, many thousands of trouts on freestone creeks and streams and rivers, a few tailwaters and spring creeks, and a few stillwaters.

I'm one of very few folks** who advocate for submerged leaders and tippets as superior to floating leaders and tippets, in most moving water situations, for the best possible drift of dry flies. Recently, I ran across a couple youtube videos where two different fellows expounded on their improved dry fly fishing results by adding a section of flouro tippet to their mono leaders to make their tippet less visible to the fishies, both quite excited about their discovery that resulted in noticeably more fishies in hand. One of those fellows was youtuber hooked4lifeca. His 6-14-2020 video is titled - Dry Fly Leader Hacks: a simple tip for significantly improving our dry fly fishing

If you want to achieve the same result without the additional cost of fluoro, you can add a bit of weight to your tippet, enough to submerge it without sinking the fly - which I believe was the technique suggested by the other youtuber, best I recall.

John

** Another formerly active BB member who was an advocate for submerged leaders and tippets for dry flies was Joanie Tomich out of Utah, AKA flygoddess.