Connections

Change is inevitable in a 45-year fly fishing career. The learning never stops.  Preferences change.  There's new discoveries, and uncovering older things that might have slipped by.  Take the connection from fly line to leader. 

I started, like most, with the simple nail knot. It worked, and I considered a long leader to be 12 ft including the tippet. There were a couple of different nail knot tools, one I settled on that worked very well, so it was also a quick solution.

Then there was the needle nail knot. Cleaner, because the end of the leader came out of the center of the fly line, but it still had the bulk of the leader wrapped around the fly line to secure it.  I could coat it with UV glue or Pliobond to make the lump smoother, but there was still that lump 12 to 18 feet up from my fly.  The little tag end of the leader always seemed to snag on a guide or tip top.

In most recent times, all the new fly lines come with welded loops. Hey, keep it simple, put a loop in your leader and connect the two quickly.  I even played around with trying to make my own welded loops in lines that I had previously cut the loop from to use the nail knot.  If you need to change leaders, the loop to loop is a quick easy change.  Since I use furled leaders, this connection is actually quite smooth, but there's still that lump there going through the guides. With my standard 7-8 feet of tippet connected to five or six feet of furled leader, I still have to wiggle the rod and pull to get the whole mess out smoothly

So some years back, there was an article in Fly Fisherman from the late, great Dave Whitlock about a knotless connection.  I can't remember, but I either skipped over it, or read it and poo poo'd it because I didn't need anything like that at the time.  Somehow earlier this year I stumbled upon a YouTube video from someone doing a demo of this connection.  It sort of stuck in my head, and I wanted to try it and see if it really worked. No knot, just a little super glue?

The video made it look easy, you simply run a needle up through the braided core of the fly line, then put the butt of the leader through the hole, super glue the end of the leader and pull it back into the fly line. Just like the needle nail not, without the knot. Does that really hold?  Just super glue a quarter-inch of butt section in the braided core of a fly line?  The kids in the video say it works. The idea comes from Dave Whitlock. That carries a ton of weight.  Gospel, if you will.

So far I'm liking it. I did it to one fly line, and the change was immediate. So smooth and easy.  Now I've done a second and third.  The connection is beautiful, I can hardly tell it's not one piece as I pull the leader and fly line through the guides and out the tip top. I'm going to give it a fair test. Big beaverhead browns on 3x.  Montana steelhead on the Missouri. A 2x nylon leader with a streamer on the end of it. What's the worst that could happen, I lose the fish of the season and the leader to go with it?  Life will go on, and we're not talking tarpon fishing here.  I'll report back, but for now, I'm all in on knotless connections on the four five and six weights. 😬

It's a thing of beauty I tell you. While fishing, it's hard to tell where the line and leader intersect unless I look.  The picture makes the expanded fly line look larger than it really is.