... Caribe, about supple leaders and tippets. But first, note that you may well have more sophisticated fish in the Driftless area than we have out here in the west. Regardless, one of my principles for fly fishing is that I only fish for near sighted, colorblind, dumb and starving fishies. Improve the odds.

In his 1999, or thereabouts, book Wisdom of the Guides, Paul Arnold interviewed ten prominent guides from the Intermountain West and Northern Rockies. I am virtually certain it was Craig Matthews, but I gave away my copy of the book, which was gifted to me by Paul, so I can't be positive it was Matthews, who spoke to the need for long traditional mono leaders with fine tippets when fishing dry flies. The leader had to be long and the tippet fine to overcome the dragging and / or steering effects of the stiff butt and relatively stiff mid sections of the leader on the dry fly, i.e. the negative impact on presentation inherent in the mono leaders of that era.

Fast forward, not all that many years, to the expanding universe of very supple thread furled leaders and supple tippets to improve presentation. They have been my staple for dry fly fishing since learning how to make them in 2004.

A couple experiments that I did some time ago speak to the advantages of thread furled leaders and some of the commonly held thoughts about how fish are put off by fly lines and visible leaders.

In 2010, I was doing quite a bit of fishing with a Tenkara rod. One day I was fishing on the Bitterroot River, which is fairly heavily fished and isn't known for a lot of near sighted, colorblind, dumb and starving fishies, with a light colored furled thread Tenkara line / leader with several feet of tippet. Over a few hours, I had managed to shorten the tippet and when I was about finished fishing, somehow I had it down to not much more than a foot. I saw some fish rising, so I just tied on a fly to the foot long tippet, and proceeded to catch some fishies. Hmmmmm.

One of my homebrew 11' or so Tenkara line / leader rigs was a bright orange. One day planning to nymph on the East Fork of the Bitterroot with a big stonefly nymph, I decided to experiment with the Tenkara line / leader with the nymph tied as close to the end of the bright orange leader as I could get it. A couple inches, at most. That was the most difficult nymph rigged I ever cast - huge, slow, open overhead loops to get the fly out over the water, and then a long, slow agony waiting for all that sink resistant thread to let the nymph get down to where there might be some fish. After a half dozen fish landed, I figured the experiment had worked and went to a more "traditional" nymph rig. I think the success of that experiment was because the fish took the bright orange leader as the largest San Juan worm attractor they had ever seen, but went for the easier to swallow morsel.

Anyway, I don't advocate for one foot long tippets off thread leaders for dries or two inch tippets off bright orange leaders for nymphing - but I do advocate for experimenting.

John