Chris Stewart started a thread on tippet length and line color on the Tenkara Forum which started an interesting discussion, but is probably more an FAOL Forum topic than a Tenkara Forum topic. Follow the link to Chris' thread.

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/bb/s...and-line-color

While finishing my second cup of coffee this morning, it occured to me that I had a bright orange thread furled leader rigged on one of my 4 wt reels. I got to thinking about Chris' thread and wondered what would happen if I fished a big old rubber legs off that leader with a very short tippet, say a foot or less, but with my 9' for 5 wt TFO BVK.

Checked the streamflows on a creek I know well. The big surge from a few days ago had settled down. Flows were high but stable. Likely the creek would be off color, but a good amount of water to fish.

Checked the weather forecast. Temps not bad. Not likely to be any precipitation. But the winds were forecast at 21 mph out of the South, which would mean casting upstream directly into a strong breeze. Not fun to start with, and not very appealing fishing a not so friendly casting combination of a heavy fly on a thread leader.

But ... what the heck. All in the name of science, right ??

Started about noon. The water was off color, maybe three to four feet of visibility, but the level was favorable, as expected. For the experiment, I would have prefered the normal clear water conditions, but clarity was good enough to give the fishies a good look at the bright orange leader close by the big stonefly nymph.

Things started pretty slowly, fishing the nymph off about 12" of tippet. Slow enough that I really wondered how things would turn out. But then I caught a fishy.



And then another. And another. Not so bad a place to fish after all, and at least the experiment was not doomed to failure, or was it.



After a while, and four fishies on the 12" tippet, I decided to cut back to about 6" of tippet, partly since I was going to be on some shallower water and partly because I wanted the bright orange leader to be really close to the fly, and then to about 4".



Over the next several hours, I fished another eight stretches of the creek with the 4" tippet set up, caught fishies in five of them, and ended up hooking over twenty fish and landing most of them. At this point, I'll just let the pixels tell the story.















I guess this doesn't really prove anything, except on one particular day on a particular creek over several stretches of water a bunch of fishies weren't at all bothered by having a rather bold orange furled leader only about 4" from the nymph them wanted to eat.

On the other hand, maybe it does mean something in more general terms. Think I'll have to do another experiment soon on a different creek.

John

P.S. The forecast breeze held off until after I finished. That made casting the big fly on a thread furled leader with a small thingamabobber manageable - not particularly fun, but manageable.