Luke wrote:
I have George Daniels book and I have tried some of the techniques, but I keep coming back to more simple approaches. I just do not understand how you can keep in touch and detect takes with almost 20 feet of leader in the water. Now maybe 8 feet of the leader is still on the rod, I don't know.
That's it. The idea of having the very long leader is not have a lot of leader out in the water. It's to have enough leader that you are just fishing leader, and have lots of leader still on the rod.
No doubt effective. But it doesn't interest me.
I like fishing with a "standard" leader that can easily be switched between nymph and dry fly use.
And I fish nymphs without indicators. And in the short, tight line high stick method where that fits the type of water.
But also fishing at medium and even long lengths, where you are not fishing a tight line in direct contact with the nymph.
It's fun to fish nymphs with 40 feet of line and leader out there, without an indicator.
From a lot of stuff you read, you get the idea that you are not "supposed" to do this. But, you can catch plenty of fish this way and it's a lot of fun.
For example on a big stream like the Little Juniata or Delaware or Lehigh or Yough, there are some big runs that you can wade along the edges of, but it's not really safe to wade all through there, especially when the water is up.
And if you waded all through there fishing a short line, you'd be spooking a lot of fish. So you fish it with "long line nymphing" for lack of a better name.
Most people do this type of fishing with a floating indicator. But you can also do it without an indicator.
When I started flyfishing around 1970 there were no indicators, so if you wanted to nymph fish further out than you can wade, you had to learn how to do "long line nymph fishing without an indicator."
There must be a better name than that. Back in the day we just called it nymph fishing.
