My Understanding of Leader dynamics

[poppernel]

Fishing a 17m leader is as good as casting a light river rod with a lead clip on weight, not true ff as one will not/ or have to practise this method, I would love to see a ff get this airborne and deliver on target, my take, not interested.
DAVE

[dizzy]

Fishing a 17m leader is as good as casting a light river rod with a lead clip on weight, not true ff as one will not/ or have to practise this method, I would love to see a ff get this airborne and deliver on target, my take, not interested.
DAVE

Seeing is believing Pops, but you're injured so I guess you'll just have to believe us on this one

[Mike Taylor]

Found one leader formula on the internet.

20' of .42mm mono
a standard 9' tapered leader
Pigs-tail indicator
then some 4lb fluorocarbon

Not the 17m that was written about but maybe worth trying to cast it as a French nymphing leader. They are recommending a min 11'6 rod.

But ... not for me, thanks. I'll leave it to my son to try.

[GGY]

Gary Please help me out here.
My understanding of these ultra long leaders are that they are mainly for nymph fishing with some weighted nymphs. So in order to cast them you use the weight of the flies to some degree. Is that correct.

As I understand it, these long leaders are for nymphing, although Mark Krige sometimes uses a fifty foot dry-fly leader. As for me - I struggle to get the fly to land where I want it with normal tackle anyway. I've tried googling Hand-to-leader fishing and all you find are post saying how good it is rather than explaining the setup and technique.

Yup - not really designed to fish dry flies - the 9m ones are a VERY long tapered leader, so while you can fish dries on them, you are limited to how well you can cast a leader only.
Fishing these with nymphs - you do use the weight of the nymphs to get the cast going. WIDE open loop - no real false casts - mor like a switch cast, if required.
I can happily fish Vaal patterns out towards the 9m leader length, if required & will play smal stream with 2.0 & 2.4mm tungsten soon - should NOT be a problem for me.

Found one leader formula on the internet.

20' of .42mm mono
a standard 9' tapered leader
Pigs-tail indicator
then some 4lb fluorocarbon

Problem with this is standard 9ft leader butt is thicker thasn 0.42mm, so would not be competition legal to attach to the thinner 0.42mm.
I have been playing on the Vaal with 10m 0.42mm, then a 0.40mm pigtail indicator, to 3X & 4X czech-style leader.

[gazzarowan]

i used a 20ft leader this weekend on a midlands stream.(20ft leader including 1.5m tippet) and got about a 2kg scalie using it. casts like a dream (used dries, dry and dropper and nymphs with it)
will see if i can find the recipe and post it here. could be nice for the smaller streams and spooky fish

[gazzarowan]

here it is

28cm 05x (0.432mm)
56cm 03x (0.381mm)
56cm 01x (0.330mm)
56cm 0x (0.279mm)
33cm 2x (0.229mm)
33cm 4x (0.178mm)
50cm 5x (0.152mm)
84cm 6x (0.127mm)

[dizzy]

What material did you use, maxima?

[gazzarowan]

ya...used maxima until adding the tippet.

used fluroflex plus for the tippet (awesome stuff!!!really impressed)

boiled the leader...
start taking out and softly stretching the end (thinner end) of the leader after 40seconds, slowly boiling each slightly thicker section a few seconds longer.
in the end, the butt section should boil for about 2 - 2.5 minutes.
all-in-all, i get an extra 20-30cm stretch from this leader. difinitely helped with the 6x on the end absorb the head shakes and hard runs.

i was using my 5wt 10ft greys streamflex

[dizzy]

i was using my 5wt 10ft greys streamflex

would you say this helped to cast the leader?

[gazzarowan]

i think it helps a bit in some instances. i was fishing standing in reeds at one point, so the extra foot did help to keep it above the reeds. but mostly, i was casting in an open-ish area so a 9 foot would be fine i feel.
otherwise shorten a few of the pieces to bring it down to 16-18ft for the 9ft rod?
definitely helped with the lower drag on the water and flies landing softly.
fly line landing a good 20ft from the fish was great.