If you're not fishing a Poly Leader on your floating Spey lines, you should be. They help turn over your fly, especially when making shorter casts. Plus, a Poly Leader give you more "grip" on the water when forming your D-Loop. More so, you can buy them in different densities from floating to fast sinking giving you a lot of flexibility in your dry line fishing.
Although Poly Leaders work great out of the box, you can get a lot more miles out of them with a simple modification. Using 20 pound Maxima, tie on a 1' butt section using a seven turn Albright Knot. Finish the other end of the butt section with a perfection loop. Loop your 2' to 4' of tippet on using a triple surgeons loop and you're ready to roll.
I've seen some leaders start to delaminate when an angler accidently places their fly into a tree and pulls like hell to get it out of squirrel land. By doing so, the core material can separate from the polyurethane coating. The Albright knot will displace the pressure equally on the core and coating. It's a great trick to make your Poly Leaders last a long time.
-TL
Tom, thanks for posting this... I was having issues with de-lamination and went back to tapered leaders because of it. I love the way the poly leader cast and will give this a try.
ReplyDeleteMatt
Tom,
ReplyDeletenew to the polyleader style. Does the polyleader take the place of the standard sink tip or is in addition too?