Lesson plans / Knots / Leaders

Of course you can share the presentation with the group provided that they understand that it was designed for delivery to a large number of CCI type persons by an experienced professional assisted by several other “experts”. Each topic was discussed and brainstormed using a flip chart before the subheadings were revealed to the audience except the content of each lesson, these were determined by each group and presented by a group member and then questioned by the audience. The last group to report were the programmers. They had to prepare their program for the course before the other groups reported and before they knew the time that each group needed to deliver its lesson. This provided the entertainment! The event was very well received and everyone learned from it and participated in it, the latter point is very important, get your students to participate if you want them to learn (not just nodding heads!).

Best wishes,

Ally Gowans

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Ally ....

Now that is professional level teaching !

I highlighted you last point.

Gordy

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From Troy Miller on knots / leaders / furled thread :-

Hi Gordy --

I'm not trying to disrespect GSP in any way, but I'm wondering why you'd do that rather than furling your leaders out of something much less expensive and more readily available (like thread, as we've done for eons)? To me, the following are pros and cons of furled thread leaders:

Pros --

Very economical -- I can furl 2 to 5 leaders from one 200 yd spool of 6/0 UniThread, and under normal usage, each will last from 5 to 25 trips (depending on the abuse of the fishing conditions). I typically trade them out about once a year, whether they need it or not, since I like making them and gotta use them somewhere.

Incredibly strong and durable -- I haven't lab tested them with a spring scale, but I have purposely used excessively strong tippet with them and wind up failing one of the tippet knots (either the perfection loop or usually the knot at the fly). For example, I've taken one of my lightest trout versions (12/10/8/6) and put 15 pound fluoroflex on it and then fish hybrid stripers to 8+ pounds with not a single failure of the furled section. That tells me that it must test out at somewhere above 12 pounds or more. I believe the furling process makes the leader "greater than the sum of its parts". I doubt that each strand of 6/0 Uni will test over 2 pounds, but 6 strands of it twisted in a tight furl will test higher than 6 X 2 lbs.

Wide variety of colors for different applications. If you use a particular reel/line for nymphing, you can use a color that you can imagine would blend in better underwater. If you exclusively fish dries with it, you can make it ivory colored or light gray or light blue or leaf green -- anything that you think would not be offensive to a fish looking up from below. The color is permanent, and won't bleed. And you can grease it to float or sink, as you require.

Totally memory free -- Can effectively cast just the leader and get it to turn over reliably with ANY amount of flyline out of the rod. Exception noted below.

Pleasure of construction -- It's a totally cool way to spend an evening furling up several leaders, and experimenting with performance. You can also build in "strike indicators" by adding one twist of a contrasting color (either at the tip end or the butt). I've been doing that on almost all of my furled leaders these days, other than my spring creek leaders where the fish may be excessively shy.

Wind knots are easy to pick (long as they're not pulled down to max tension), relative to mono leaders. And after you do pick one, you're not left with an obvious kink there. If you do have a wind knot that you have to leave in place, it doesn't significantly weaken the leader, like it does with mono (the nearly 50% reduction that Lefty describes).

Cons --

Can't really build one on the water. Need to anticipate what you'll need ahead of time and build appropriate leaders to carry with you.

Won't reliably turn over flies that have a poor mass/wind resistance ratio. Will turn over streamlined flies like a clouser fine, just about any common trout flies like dries, wets, nymph rigs, egg patterns, etc. Will turn over buggers and streamers beautifully, even heavily weighted ones. What I HAVE NOT come up with is a furled leader design that will reliably turn over a big parachute such as a 3/0 deer hair popper, large skater/spider dries, or a George Harvey Night Fly.

Need to find the "right" thread to furl with. Most fly tying threads do NOT furl well. Uni is in my experience the hands-down favorite, and I like 6/0 the best for being a good balance of limpness and practical, useful diameter. What I mean is that their 8/0 will make a fine leader, but you have to use so many more turns to achieve adequate mass. So it may take a whole spool of 8/0 to make one leader, whereas you could get three leaders per spool of 6/0. 3/0 will make nice heavy leaders, but due to it's thickness you can't easily fine tune the number of turns to acheive the mass you like if you want to make lighter leaders. You can only make 3 turns or 4 turns, but not 3.5 turns if that's what you need.

I don't know, maybe Pat was talking about using GSP for super heavy-duty leaders like for poon, billfish, tuna, etc., for which a furled thread leader would be obviously ineffective. Someday, maybe I'll be fortunate enough to target those species more regularly and have to worry about such stuff. :)

Regards -- TAM

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Troy....

Tom White would be proud of your thoughtful descriptions .... especially your attention to, ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES.

Gordy

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For some, "fishing entertainment", see if you can access this link:-

http://www.unoriginal.co.uk/nuvideos1234/sharksurf.wmv

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From Ed Chamberlain on my leader faux pas :

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED

Caveats: NONE

Gordy,

Why did you use a uni-knot loop to make a loop to loop connection? The uni

loop closes down under pressure as I recall, and builds in the knot slippage

that Lefty credits the cause of all knot breakage. Now the 20/20 hindsight

and arm chair QB'ing is great; would have though as you mentioned either the

3 turn surgeon loop or skip the loop to loop (since you are going to lose

loop to loop as soon as you jump a fish and put the leader system under

tension) and go with slim beauty or something.

You did caveat that you had insufficient class material. In that case would

you have been better served to add an additional knot to system and extend

the class tippet to allow either the improved blood or slim beauty directly

to butt?

Sounds like you are getting into fish. How are Peter and Dusty doing? ;-)

Regards to all, Ed

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Ed.... It was strictly the psychosis brought on by rough seas, fish to chase, and a leader which needed to be quickly shortened in the heat of the moment.

If I'd been rational, I'd have tied a triple surgeons knot .... I could have done that even faster and despite the fact that it was rough, (green water over the bow once we went after that critter) and I had, poon fever .

Lots of better choices which I didn't use.

Gordy

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From Al Crise:

Howdy Casters

I think that there is as many knots to use as there are casters. There are a couple of what we might call Experts. Books written and they Test the knots before they say it is a good knot.

There are a few things a knot must:

Be easy to tie, Strong as the material or close to it. Not bulky, Hold when wet, Hold with different types of materials or sizes.Fast to tie.

I have a couple of thoughts just to teases your head; Should the backing to reel be the strongest knot you can tie as it is the last chance or should it be the weakest so that all you lose it your backing, fly line, leader and fly. Not the rod and reel?

I can no longer tell the Boy Scouts to "Taste the knot to be sure it is tight" This was my way of making them wet the knot. Today it is no longer safe to place the leaders in your mouth if they have been in the water. What a shame.

If you were to teach a beginners class could you just teach a Surgeon's knot?

: Tied between two different pieces or into a loop,

This one knot could be used for:

Backing to reel, Big loop Backing to fly line big loop in backing small loop in fly line. loop to loop connection.

Loop to loop at the fly line to leader,

Leader to tippet surgeon;s or triple surgeons,

at the fly you could make a surgeon's loop with the fly on the loop.

Of course any good fly fisher person would not limit themselves to this type of 'knotsmithing'.....

Know your Knots.

I teach a Surgeon;s, Surgeon's & Perfection loops for loop to loop connections, Improved Clinch knots. (KISS; Keep It Simple Simon).

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