The Troutbitten Podcast, Season Two, is available everywhere you listen to your podcasts.
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Part five of this Troutbitten Skills Series is about finding contact. Because after the tuck cast, after we stick the landing and begin to recover slack, we need to find contact on sighter.
Contact is visual. It’s about reading the sighter to know that we are in touch with the flies from rod tip to the nymph or split shot. It’s not about touching or ticking the riverbed. Instead, the contact we’re looking for is seen on the sighter.
With contact, we know everything about the depth and speed of our flies. We know where they are, and we determine where they are going. That’s the advantage of a tight line (contact) nymphing system.
Importantly, this does not mean we are directly in touch at all times with the fly, because we often get better drifts without such direct influence over the nymphs. But without contact at points through the drift (and sometimes the whole way) we are simply guessing about the location of the flies. To take advantage of the ultimate control that tight line and euro nymphing rigs offer, we must learn to read contact on the sighter — to know we are in touch and know where the flies are.
Reading the sighter and finding contact is critical.
My friend, Austin Dando, joins me on episode five for an in-depth discussion of this technique.
(Season three will return to my full panel of friends, with longer form discussion about all things fly fishing.)
We Cover the Following
- Contact is seen, not felt
- Reading the sighter
- Sighter material and construction
- The Backing Barrel
- The bow in the sighter
- Nervous sighter
- Seeing beyond the sighter
- Contact let’s us trust the sighter
- Forcing contact
Remember, each of these podcasts is supported by a companion article of the same topic. And you can find the full overview of the Nine Essential Skills for Tight line and Euro Nymphing here:
READ: Troutbitten | The Nine Essential Skills for Tight Line and Euro Nymphing
READ; Troutbitten | #5 Finding Contact — Nine Essential Skill for Tight Line and Euro Nymphing
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Resources
READ: Troutbitten | The Nine Essential Skills for Tight Line and Euro Nymphing
READ: Troutbitten | Category | The Mono Rig
READ: Troutbitten | Contact is Visual
READ: Troutbitten | The Backing Barrel might be the best sighter ever
READ: Troutbitten | Design and Function of the Standard Troutbitten Mono Rig
You can find the dedicated Troutbitten Podcast page at . . .
Episode six of season two is coming soon. Thanks again for your support, everyone.
Fish hard, friends.
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Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com
This was an excellent podcast. Thanks guys. Here is a thought that I’d like your thoughts on: the shorter the tippet, the better the contact. It is fairly commonplace these days in US Euro circles to use long tippets. I think that this is mainly due to the penchant of many American Euro anglers to fish at distance across stream. However, if one if fishing more vertically, and closer to the rod, my experience has been that the shorter the tippet, the better the contact. I’m now fishing a tippet that is no more than 10-20% deeper than the average water I fish. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue, Dom.
Hi Alex,
I always love your thoughts and discussions. I know you think about this stuff a lot.
I don’t necessarily agree that the shorter the tippet the better the contact. Maybe if we’re comparing eight feet vs two feet of tippet, sure. But I think that better contact might be perceived because the sighter is simply closer to the flies. Try adding a Backing Barrel with no tag somewhere on your tippet to help see it. That way you can use very long tippet sections and still, perhaps, have the same contact. I just don’t think good contact is really predicated on how long the tippet is — within reason.
Last point: I do not like adjusting my tippet length throughout the day much. To me, one of the joys of these rigs is the ability to adapt WITHOUT adjusting flies, weights, tippet length, etc. Instead, we can adjust with the cast, the tuck, our leading angles, speeds, etc. So I almost always go with a fixed length. For me that is usually five feet. It used to be six feet. I sometimes go as short as 3.5 feet. But usually . . . five feet.
Cheers.
Dom
Can’t agree more with this. I usually start out with about 6 feet of tippet and place a backing barrel w/tag on the tippet. When I fish a shallower section I just slide my backing barrel down closer to my flies and use that (backing barrel) as my primary sighter. When I hit a very deep run I slide my barrel all the way up to just below the tippet ring connected to my sighter. So much easier than applying/removing skafars on the tippet
Agreed. Under no restrictions of competition rules, there’s no way I’m using wax.