Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Winter steelhead eat a fly that is already deep and already under tension. A welded sink tip of two feet of T-8, seven and a half feet of T-11 and three feet of T-14, attached to the Skagit head at the T-8 end, gets a light tube fly roughly six feet down and swinging on a straight line.
Eric Leininger is a Portland, Oregon steelhead and carp guide who spent nine seasons guiding in southwest Alaska, works at a Portland fly shop, and runs his own guide business, Fly Fish Portland.
Also on Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Why doesn't mending a Skagit head also mend the sink tip?
Drone footage of two accomplished two-handed anglers showed the problem clearly: they lifted and mended the Skagit head upriver, but the sink tip kept sinking sideways and the fly stayed level with or even upstream of the head. When the line came tight, the fly accelerated downriver and made a hard turn across the run. Sink tips have no taper and no float, so a mend made once the tip is in the water does nothing to the fly.
What did the drone show the chinook actually doing?
Because the anglers were fishing a white and chartreuse fly, the drone footage picked it up against the bottom. Large chinook turned their heads to the right as the fly whipped past them, the way you would flinch at a bird crossing your face, then went back to holding. The fish were seeing the fly, but it was moving too fast, too late in the swing, for any of them to commit.
How do you build a sink tip that fishes a fly six feet down?
The recipe is two feet of T-8, seven and a half feet of T-11 and three feet of T-14, welded into one twelve-and-a-half-foot tip. Overlap each joint about four inches inside a six-inch piece of level tubing, melt it with a heat gun, roll it out and trim the tubing. The counterintuitive part is which end connects to the Skagit head: attach the thin T-8 end, not the T-14, so the tip carries on the taper of the head instead of hanging off it.
What Skagit head and rod does that sink tip pair with?
The tip is built around a multi-density Skagit head of roughly 23 and a half feet: about a foot and a half of floating line into around fifteen feet of intermediate and six feet of type 3, all integrated. The rod is a 13-foot 7-weight spey. Because the T-14 section clings to the water on the sweep, the cast needs a small amount of extra speed to load the rod, then the same relaxed forward stroke.
How do you fish a bucket that sits deeper than the rest of the run?
A run on the Clackamas called Dead Horse is over fifteen feet deep, and most anglers catch the fish on the inside seam if they are first through. The second bucket sits off a ledge nearly across the run. Reaching it takes twenty or more pulls of running line, an exaggerated mend, and about ten seconds of free fall before the fly swings for a second and gets hammered.
Which Columbia River carp are worth casting to?
Carp travelling in schools are going somewhere to feed and will almost never stop for a fly. Pairs of slow, head-bobbing browsers looking for food are the spookiest and hardest of the three groups. Tailing carp are the ones to target: they are committed enough that you could drop a firecracker beside them, but the feeding window is short, roughly ten seconds from the moment the tail tips up.
How do you present a fly to a tailing carp?
Cast a foot or two past the fish and about six inches in front of it so the fly does not land on its back. As soon as the fly hits, lift the rod tip and drag the fly across the surface, then drop it just off the side of the carp's head. Carp have eyes on the sides of their heads, so a fly dropped directly in front lands in the blind spot. Two false casts is the working limit; four and the fish is gone.
Key takeaways
- A mend made after a sink tip is in the water only moves the Skagit head; the fly is repositioned with an aerial mend or a corrected cast.
- Weld two feet of T-8, seven and a half feet of T-11 and three feet of T-14 into one twelve-and-a-half-foot tip, and connect it to the Skagit head at the T-8 end.
- T-14 sinks roughly seven to eight inches per second, so a ten count puts the fly around six feet down.
- Fish light tube flies on the heavy tip rather than heavy dumbbell-eyed flies, which are what actually make a Skagit cast hard.
- Carp on the Columbia feed best between about 73 and 86 degrees, and average six to twenty pounds, with fish of 16 and 17 pounds boated this season.
- Pick the species to match the day's weather: overcast and humid for mayfly hatches, cool and rainy for summer steelhead and chinook, full sun and light wind for carp.
