Yuba madness!!

[esummers]

Interesting. I used to hear about people using a clay composite of some sort that they applied to their leader in order to hide the shaddow etc. Not sure if people are still doing that or not.

[dryflychico]

esummers,

Not sure if people still do that here (in the States) but they still use it a lot in Ireland and the UK. That was the suggestion I got from many people back there, even picked up a jar of the stuff. It works pretty good but you have to reapply it fairly frequently and the guy that ties flies for me out of the UK suggested using fluoro, like Bigfly indicated, and I found that to be much more effective. I've used it over here on the Yuba and Tricky when I'm trying to get into the film and it works great, plus it's cheap.

Just my .02 and worth every penny

[Ralph]

Break a small chunk from a bar of unscented hand soap and stash it in one of those little pill sized zip locks. Wet your fore finger, wipe it on the soap, then slide your finger along any desired length of tippet or leader. A few inches is usually enough. The treated mono will instantly break through the surface tension. To keep the nymph suspended just a few inches under the surface, treat the un-soaped section of tippet with fly floatant.

[Charlie Gonzales]

Great thread and some really good info to go along with it. BTW, anybody look at the Yuba flows lately? Scary!

[Hogan Brown]

ralph that is a great trick. I have never heard that one before but makes sense.

[bigfly]

The euro guys call it Fullers earth. Here we call it Snake River Mud, made by Loon.
You can sink 2-3x Mono leaders. Too bad you can't thread a sz 24 on them.
Find a section of clear slow, and very shallow water, and lay your leader down on the water. Check out the shadow on the river bottom, that is what the fish see. It is the bend in the surface film that enlarges the shadow.
No wonder you weren't catching fish!

[Larry S]

You will find this in another, previous thread. Two books that you should reference are
HANDBOOK of HATCHES by Dave Hughes and FISH FOOD by Ralph and Lisa Cutter. Both
of these books contain many of these tips and are good reads. I'm sure Bill Kiene
can direct you to both books. Let's support these authors and this incredible fly shop.
Larry S

[esummers]

Here Here Larry. I'm going to pick up these books in the very near future.

[Rick J]

when fishing Silver Creek I use fluoro tippet attached to my leader - I will still grease it to within a foot or so of the fly but this allows the leader to sink (even with size 24 flies) - however there are major disagreements on whether this is good or bad - some believe a sunken leader to be more intrusive to fish - not really sure who is right though I certainly catch fish on Silver Creek with this technique so plan to stick with it

[dryflychico]

BigFly,

Good call, that's the stuff I got over there "Fuller's Earth". Sounded right and I just went and double checked in my garage to make sure.

Didn't actually try using it on the fluorocarbon, figured the fluoro was already sinking, bought it originally to put on the last foot of tippet, worked well for that, just wore off after a while like I said. So I switched to some fluoro which seemed to do a good job of sinking into the film without having to apply anything.

Anyone else use fluoro this way? Am I missing something, or is this a good technique?

dryflychico (aka Josh)