Devin Olsen and Lance Egan have released Modern Nymphing Elevated. It’s a follow up to their excellent video from a short while back, Modern Nymphing.

The subtitle for the latest video is “Beyond the Basics,” and that’s a good way to look at it. Elevated jumps right into the deep end from the beginning, so without taking a look at the first Modern Nymphing video (from 2016) or without a very firm grasp of long leader techniques to begin with, the viewer may be a little lost. Elevated is more of an addendum — like added chapters to a book — than a standalone work. There’s no recap of the basics and no rehashing of leader formulas . Instead, Elevated is two hours of video dedicated to the nuances of long leader fly fishing. And that’s a good thing.

Coverage

Elevated covers better casting, common drift mistakes, arm and rod positioning, managing the line and leader, sighter angles, strike detection, drift principles, stream positioning, approach and many other in-depth elements that simply catch more fish.

Modern Nymphing Elevated begins to cover a lot of the variations to a Mono Rig that are possible. And I’ve written about them extensively on Troutbitten:

Tight Line Nymphing with an Indicator — Adding an indicator and using tight line principles to better fish an indy rig.

Tight Line Dry dropper — Fishing a slide-able dry dropper on the Mono Rig.

Streamers on the Mono Rig — Swapping the nymphs and light tippet out for something a little different beyond the sighter, and throwing any type of streamer you want — again with the benefit of the Mono Rig.

I’m often asked where to find videos about fishing the Mono Rig. My answer is to check out Modern Nymphing and now the follow up, Modern Nymphing Elevated. Olsen and Egan offer a fantastic resource that builds the techniques from the ground up, from the basics on through to advanced techniques.

Semantics

Incidentally, I’ve been through this before, but I’ll quickly mention it here as well. There are two reasons I call this stuff the Mono Rig and not Euro Nymphing:

For one, Joe Humphreys fished and wrote about what he called the Mono Rig back in the seventies. I read about it in his 1981 book, Trout Tactics, so the term stuck with me.

And two, we do a lot more than just nymphing with these long leaders, so I feel like the term Euro Nymphing is inherently limiting, by title. I’m a writer, so words matter to me . . . a lot.

Resources

Regardless of what you choose to call it, tightline principles and long leaders are killer tactics that allow for tremendous control and exciting fishing. And you can now find two great videos that demonstrate the techniques here:

Modern Nymphing

Modern Nymphing Elevated

You can also read a lot more about the Mono Rig here on Troutbitten.

Fish hard, friends.

Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com