According to fly-line manufacturers, floating lines make up about 80 percent of the fly-line market, with sinking lines (in their myriad forms) consuming the lion’s share of the remaining 20 percent. Sink tips, the redheaded stepchild of the fly-line world, are a hybrid of floating and sinking lines and make up less than 1 percent of the flyline market. Despite the seemingly mediocre sales, the sink tip is a valuable line to have in your arsenal and can sometimes be the best way to target big fish. In this column, we will take a look at sink-tip lines for single-handed rods. Sink tips for double-handers have evolved so far down their own track that they really need a separate article.
Subsurface Headaches
A sink tip is basically 5 to 15 feet of sinking line that is attached or fused to the front of a floating line. They were originally designed to address difficulties encountered when fishing subsurface flies in rivers, and this is still the primary reason why anglers use them. As anyone who has fished a river or stream will quickly realize, moving water does not travel as a uniform mass. The bottom and sides of a river have texture caused by stuff such as sand, pebbles, boulders, weeds, and shopping carts, which creates drag and slows the water down. The middle of the river is generally less cluttered, and as a result, the water moves faster.
If you fished only in the California Aqueduct, this would probably be all you would need to know. However, things become more complex when you fish natural rivers or streams, where the middle of the flow, as well, is full of fish-holding structure such as boulders and weed beds. This in-stream structure creates a complex, three-dimensional matrix of currents that would have even the most proficient mathematician popping Vicodin. These writhing currents move sections of your fly line downstream at conflicting rates. The result is drag and is most clearly
visible when fishing dry flies. Instead of heading downstream like the naturals, a dry fly subject to drag cuts across the surface in an unnatural manner, sometimes even forming a small wake. With a floating line, fly fishers address this two-dimensional drag environment by mending with judicious lifts and f lips of the line. Basically, mending is a way to put just enough slack in the line, in the right place, to offset the currents and allow the f ly to head downstream as naturally as possible.
Drag in sinking lines is another matter. Not only do you have the extra dimension of depth and those mathematically migrainous subsurface currents to deal with, it’s nigh on impossible to mend a line once it has sunk more than an inch. When submerged, the line is at the mercy of the currents. This is where the sink tip comes to the rescue. The sinking tip section gets your fly down to feeding fish, while the floating belly section allows you to mend the rest of the line to enhance your presentation as needed.
For those fly fishers who are proficient with an indicator rig, the obvious question is why not just use a floating line, an indicator, and a leader rigged with shot? For short-range work, this setup performs well. But try to cast that lot over 30 feet with decent accuracy and things can get ugly in a hurry. Many of the best lies are in places that demand almost pinpoint casts. Screw up, and your fly may or may not come back. Long leaders strung with shot are notorious for ending up in trees, stuck on rocks, or forming nightmarish tangles. Pretty soon you give up and go back to working the easier sections of water along with the rest of the punters. This leaves a lot of very good water unfished.
Leaders or Lines?
There are two ways of obtaining a sinking tip. The first is to connect a special sinking leader to a floating line. Polyleaders (Airf lo) and VersiLeaders (RIO) and Third Coast Tips (Scientific Anglers) are examples of this approach (Third Coast Tips are designed for Spey lines, but a 7-weight rod will handle the 8-foot 80-grain tips. SA tells me they are working on a line of tips specifically for single-handed rods).
These leaders are a cinch to use. You simply loop the fat end to your fly line and knot a section of tippet to the thin end. A small tippet ring can be attached to the leader if you often change tippets. It has been a few years since I regularly used a sinking leader setup on my single-handed rods. I found they worked quite well when fishing flies smaller than a lightly weighted three-inch streamer pattern, which, let’s face it, is huge to most folks. If you seldom fish flies of this size, the sinking leader setup may be all you ever need.
But what if you want to target large fish with large, often heavy flies? There are special sinking leaders designed for these applications, but once you get serious about this kind of fishing, it probably makes more sense to go to a dedicated sink-tip line. With the exception of some warm water and saltwater lines, the front taper of most floating lines is designed to handle a long, light leader and normal-sized flies. The taper simply doesn’t have the mass to drive a heavy leader with a bulky (and often weighted) fly knotted to the tippet. In addition, the abrupt change in density at the line-to-leader transition can cause the line to kick, which can make accurate casts difficult. You can always chop a few feet off your floating line to make the transition less abrupt, but who really wants to do that to a perfectly good floating line? A proper sink-tip line solves these problems
According to the line manufacturers, fly fishers in the United States tend to opt for a 6-weight sink-tip line, though 7-weights are not that unusual. With large flies and the chance of some seriously hefty fish, this isn’t a place for delicate tackle anyway.
Line weight isn’t the only consideration. The sink rate of the tip is very important. A slow-sinking tip (two to three inches per second) will usually work fine if you are fishing from a boat and slamming streamers at the banks. If you want to cover deeper waters, go for a fast-sinking tip, which drops the fly down to the fish at five to six inches per second. There are a lot of sink tips on the market, so you may initially find things a bit confusing.
I could go into more detail on these lines and chew up an extra page of text, but there’s a simpler solution. Just go online. Several line makers provide online guidance that will quickly get you the right line for your specific situation. If you fish with a guide, ask him or her. They will more than likely have things dialed in for their waters.
(Editor’s note: another approach is to just wing it. Three decades ago I bought a Hi-D sink-tip just to have one on hand. A few years later, in Montana, I attached to it a lead-core leader to ensure I could sweep the bottom of several large rivers there. This rig, fished with an olive Matuka, hooked two huge browns — the biggest trout I’ve yet caught — from a deep run on the Jefferson. The sink-tip was a serendipitous purchase and ultimately an investment that more than returned its value on that single trip.)
Warmwater Applications
A lot of fly fishers view largemouth bass fishing as a top-water sport, where flies that supposedly imitate frogs are thrown into lily pads or alongside docks in the hope of provoking an explosive take. I certainly enjoy fishing this way, but just like dry fly fishing for trout, this isn’t always the best way to connect with fish. Most of the time, your fly is going to get more attention if it sinks. Not surprisingly, this is where most fly fishers turn to sinking lines.
I must confess that much of my bass f ishing involves tungsten-impregnated lines that cast like crap and sink at an alarming rate. I want the line to get my fly down fast, and I want it to stay down. But there are plenty of times when the fish are neither crashing frogs on top nor crushing crawdads on the bottom. To be successful, you need to meet them halfway, and this is where the sink tip comes in handy.
While this type of midwater feeding sometimes occurs in open water, more often than not, the fish are in close proximity to some sort of structure, such as tules, rocks, trees, or weeds. These fish will readily hit a fly as it drops down through the water. There are two things that are critical to success with this tactic — you need to be able to place the fly in the right spot, and you need to see the take. If the fish are just 2 or 3 feet down, a floating line and weighted fly on a 6-foot leader will do the trick. The fly line becomes a skinny indicator and “ticks” when a bass vacuums your fly into its cavernous mouth. But what if the fish are holding deeper? If the fish are down 6 or 10 feet (which is often the case in the summer and fall), you are going to need a 9-to15-foot leader. As was mentioned above, it is hard to be accurate when casting weighted flies on a long leader. An unweighted fly knotted to a short leader and a fast-sinking line helps solve the accuracy problem, but you are going to miss a lot of the takes, because you can’t see the line tick when it has sunk into murky waters.
This is where I use a fast-sinking sink-tip line with a light-colored floating belly section. The tip gets the fly down, and the floating belly section acts as a bite indicator. A 6-weight line with a fast-sinking tip will easily handle flies that mimic the conventional tackle angler’s four-inch plastic worms.
You can catch a heck of a lot of bass with this rig, but if you really want to get serious about fly fishing for bass, I’d recommend procuring a fast-sinking 8-weight or 9-weight sink tip. These lines will roll cast some seriously heavy flies. By “seriously heavy,” I mean flies with a one-sixteenth-ounce or even a one-eighth-ounce lead or tungsten bullet head snugged up against the hook eye.
Why would any sane person want to cast something that heavy? Two reasons. First of all, a lightly weighted fly will tend to fall in an arc, because the floating section of the fly line acts as a pivot point. This takes the fly away from the structure and may reduce your catch rate. Bigger bass are couch potatoes that can be fussy about leaving their underwater furniture, and sometimes they will ignore a fly that is more than a couple of feet away. The heavy fly falls through the water more vertically, keeping it closer to the hungry bass. The other reason for choosing a heavy fly is that it drops more quickly, which often helps trigger reaction bites. Even a well-fed bass will instinctively respond to a lure or fly that moves quickly through its strike zone. This fast-drop presentation is a sort of reverse version of the Leisenring Lift that expert nymphers often use to induce a trout to take.
Sink Tips in the Surf Zone
Another place where the sink tip can really shine is in the surf. Nearshore troughs are often productive pieces of water. These long, linear features are formed just inshore of sandbars and run parallel to the beach. Waves push water over the sandbar and into the trough. This water becomes trapped between the sandbar and shoreline and is forced to move parallel to the beach, often creating a strong current. Put another way, a trough is basically a river of salt water that conveniently runs right along the beach. As far as surf zone predators are concerned, currents mean food. The edges of the trough are the equivalent of riverbanks, and fish will often travel along these features as they hunt for food. The longer you can keep your fly moving along these banks, the more likely it is to get slammed.
The nearshore bank (closest to the beach) can often be fished by simply casting out, allowing the line to be pulled down current, and then retrieving the fly parallel to the beach. I have had plenty of big stripers, fat flatties, and chunky perch smash flies that are pulled through water that is no more than a rod’s length from dry sand. But wouldn’t you know it — the far bank, where the trough blends into the sandbar, usually holds the most and largest fish. You can cover this water with a sinking line and a wet-fly swing, but the fly tends to sweep through the hot zone pretty quickly. With a sink tip, you can mend the line just as you would when fishing the opposite bank of a river, and this allows you to hold the fly in the hot zone much longer. A 9-weight fast-sinking sink tip put me into a lot of surf-zone stripers this year. On a rather slow morning this May, I connected with just two fish that were working the far bank of a boisterous trough. Both hit the fly very hard, ripped the entire line and well over 100 feet of backing off the reel, and took almost 20 minutes of fully bent 9-weight to coax onto wet sand. Their combined weight was a little shy of 25 pounds. Not bad for a redheaded stepchild fly line.
