Rods, reels, flies, and leaders notwithstanding, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that the fly line is the most important part of your kit. A good line turns over and shoots easily, presents your fly in the right part of the water column, is easy to see, doesn’t kink when the temperature is cold or get limp or get sticky when it’s warm, takes terminal connections nicely, and is durable enough to last through a number of seasons’ hard use. From where I sit, a fly line that fails to meet as few as one of those criteria is a bad line. And while a good line probably won’t turn a crummy rod into a performer, a bad line will make you wonder why you spent all that money for a good rod.
We’ve always had a pretty wide variety of fly lines from which to choose, though it’s significantly larger today with more line companies in the game. As late as the early 1970s, Scientific Anglers and Cortland were the only really visible fly-line companies. Both made both top-end lines and budget-priced lines, selling some of the latter to other companies as house brands. Cortland’s 444 series and SA’s Air Cel Supreme were the more expensive choices. They were offered as trout and salmon/steelhead-oriented floaters in double-taper and weight-forward configurations and as specialty weight-forward-taper bass-bug and saltwater floaters. You could also get full sinking lines in weight-forward or double-taper configurations in four sink rates and 10-foot and 20-foot weight-forward sink tips. A shooting head in one of the four sinking densities was inexpensive, but the frugal among us stretched our money by buying a 90-foot sinking double-taper line, cutting and looping it in into three 30-foot heads. Budget-priced lines such as Cortland’s 333 and SA’s Air Cel saved you 30 percent over top-end lines, but were available only in limited configurations. If either company made Spey lines, they didn’t talk about in the United States. As to color choice, within a company’s line types, there was none. Cortland 444 floaters were a soft peach color, SA Supremes were white. Scientific Anglers’s sinking lines were various shades of green, while Cortland’s were brown.
Relatively speaking that was a simple world, though with a pretty reasonable number of line options for single-handed rods. Compared with what’s available today, however, it was the equivalent of the lunch menu on an economy airline. Add the dizzying number of Skagit, Scandi, European, and traditional lines used in f ishing with double-handed rods, and you’re facing a line smorgasbord with a seemingly unending selection.
Cortland and SA are still around, but now Airflo, RIO, Royal Wulff, Monic, and a couple of boutique line companies are fighting it out with them for market share. Want an intermediate line with a clear tip and a short front taper for tarpon on an incoming tide in March? You’ll probably be able to find it. How about a weight-forward floater for trout in skinny water, or a forward-weighted line for an “aggressive caster” or for fishing indicators? Yep and yep. A dull-colored line so you don’t spook a New Zealand guide, or a bright-colored line so you can see it? Easy. A supple line for use on a softer bamboo or glass fly rod? Piece of cake. So, too, with specialty lines for panfish, smallmouths, largemouths, carp, bonefish, billfish, stripers, tuna, trevallies, and Walton knows what else. Expanding a brand or product line by slicing and dicing the product into multiple, differentiated offerings is a tried-and-true strategy for growth, and with fly lines, it’s played out every day in fly-fishing catalogs, on Web sites, and on dealer shelves. Along with occasional consternation at the number of choices, this variety and the steady, incremental improvement in fly-line quality have been of great benefit to fly fishers as the number of fish we chase increases and the ways we fly fish for them evolve.
The Line’s Coating
In terms of what goes into making a fly line, manufacturers are divided on the issues of surface coatings and the core around which those coatings are applied.
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is the traditional plastic coating for fly lines and is used on the majority of them. Manufacturers can add microballoons to it to make a line float or tungsten powder to make it sink. They can tweak the PVC formulation to suit a line to different kinds of fishing: a stiffer coating for tropical conditions to keep the line from going soft and sticky, for example, or for distance casting, or a softer coating for cold conditions or delicate presentations. It’s a complicated alchemy that includes additives, or surface applications, or finishes designed to improve line speed and distance, with line companies all touting the virtues of their proprietary formulations. However, two companies, Airflo and Monic, coat their lines not with PVC, but with polyurethanes of one sort or another. They argue that it’s tougher, has less memory, and is more friendly to the environment when discarded. I fish lines with both coatings, and while I’ve generally been happy with most of them, I’ve noticed that polyurethane-coated lines do tend to be a bit tougher, but also a bit larger in diameter than PVC lines, leaving less room on the reel for the backing that the puny fish I catch rarely let me see.
Surface finish is another point of difference. A smooth surface seems intuitively to be the best finish for a fly line, but a textured surface has been a feature of some lines since the 1970s. Lines by England’s Masterline, with a subtly pebbled finish, gained converts in the United States way back then for how nicely they shot line and presented a fly. More recently, Scientific Anglers introduced Sharkskin lines, featuring an aggressively textured finish. I fished them a lot when they first came out and noticed that they floated high, picked up off the water better, and shot more easily than my other lines. This was due, SA explained, to the textured finish’s greater surface area and lessened guide contact when shooting line. But the relatively rough finish on the Sharkskins made noise going back and forth through the guides and annoyed some folks who, unlike me, still have most of their hearing. The texture was also of concern in any fishing where you were stripping line across a bare finger. Think round file. You really needed to cover your stripping finger, and I went through three layers of waterproof adhesive tape on my index finger one morning in Baja. Scientific Anglers heard those concerns and soon came out with a less aggressive surface textured fly line that they called — ta da! — Textured. This solved both problems, but didn’t pick up or shoot quite as easily or as well. SA’s solution in 2015–16 is Sharkwave, a tricolored line that features the aggressive Sharkskin texture on the tip for a high-floating line, the softer Textured texture on the head and running line for an easy shoot and pickup, and a smooth surface where the head meets the running line to keep the decibels down. Orvis, which owns SA, offers a similar line with just the aggressively tapered tip and more modestly pebbled head and running line. Airflo’s Ridge lines, made in England, have tiny grooves running along their length to reduce surface contact with guides and promote better shooting and line pickup.
A Line’s Core
Nylon monofilaments and multifilaments have been used selectively by line companies for many years, in conjunction with specific coatings to provide stiffness or suppleness. Solid monofilaments are used on most clear lines. Hollow braided cores are softer and used on lines with softer coatings intended for colder waters, while solid braids are used on stiffer-coated tropical lines to keep them from becoming too limp. Each of these nylon-core lines has some stretch built into it. At maximum load, just before failure, that stretch can go as high as 30 percent. Since the coating itself has some memory and can take a set, a core that stretches can be helpful for getting the memory out of a line. There’s also an arguable advantage to having some stretch in the line to reduce the risk of breaking off a fish, especially a heavy fish such as a tarpon.
For the past year or so, however, a couple of line companies have extolled the advantages of lines built around cores that stretch very little: something less than 6 percent for the polyethylene core that RIO calls ConnectCore. And Monic, by Flow Tek of Colorado, builds some lines around a gel-spun core that has zero stretch. Fabricators of low-stretch or no-stretch lines argue that these cores make for more secure and faster hook sets, greater sensitivity for better timing of casts, easier line lift, and sharp, precise mends. I’ve enjoyed the casting and fishing qualities of the new RIO lines I’ve used, though I’m really not sure that the lack of stretch is noticeable. I do notice a difference in feel with a 9-weight gelspun-cored Monic intermediate, but I’ve not tried light-line versions. And whether it helps or not is something I’ve not yet answered.
Critics of low-stretch cores argue that a straight fly line is the key to the most direct connection to a fish. As Lefty says, you can’t move the end of the fly line or the fly until the line is straight. Since line coatings themselves have memory, it takes a core with some stretch to let you remove the set and straighten the fly line. Monic argues that neither its polyurethane coating nor its gel-spun-core lines have memory, so perhaps the issue is irrelevant. But then neither have I noticed greater coil memory with my RIO InTouch lines with ConnectCore than with those using nylon cores.
A more telling argument is that fly-line cores of any material are made from materials testing out at 20 pounds or more breaking strength, and the published amount that a core stretches is determined at maximum tension. Nobody, including most of the tarpon/tuna gang, ever puts that much pressure on a fish. Indeed, they argue that the amount that a line stretches in casting, striking, and playing a fish is too low to be significant, regardless of the type of core. If stretch occurs, it’s going to be at the leader and tippet. Whether nylon or fluorocarbon, leaders and tippets are far less strong and thus stretch more readily under fishing loads than the line’s heavier core.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out, particularly between SA’s nylon-core textured lines and RIO’s polyethylene-core low-stretch smooth lines. Perhaps an angler can shade the odds a bit with a low-stretch line or, for that matter, with a textured line. Or not. In any event, the important thing is to fish a line that casts well, shoots far, puts the fly where you want it, picks up easily, and lasts long enough to justify the $70 to $90 you spent buying it. And just to rattle a cage or two, my trusty inflation calculator tells me that assuming production, packaging, and marketing costs have stayed the same, the $15 top-end fly line of 1975 should cost only $66.50 today.
New Manufacturers
Another interesting feature of the current line market has been the continuing emergence of new — some would call them “boutique” — line companies. Masterline had it’s day, but it was a pretty short one, so I’m calling out Royal Wulff for their Triangle Taper lines and Jim Teeny, for introducing what we now call an integrated-shooting-head line, as the real first of these boutique makers.
Teeny’s lines combined a very heavy, fast-sinking 24-foot tip with a floating running line. They cast like a box of rocks, and you were stuck with the one fast sink rate, but for anglers uninterested in carrying or casting multiple sinking shooting heads in front of mono running line — such as our friends in Washington and Oregon, and the occasional Easterner who’d discovered sinking lines — they got your fly down where it often mattered. Triangle Taper lines, patented by Royal Wulff and fabricated for them by Scientific Anglers, have a long-headlength front taper that allows for quite delicate presentations. Despite never being made with SA’s most current coating formulations, they gained strong followings. I never found them noticeably more delicate than a good weight-forward or double-taper line, though they roll cast quite well. There are now multiple specialty Triangle Taper incarnations, including sinking and Spey models, all of which have their adherents.
Monic fly lines, the love child of a gifted chemical engineer with an angling habit, got its start with a patented clear polyurethane coating over clear mono cores. They became favorites of a bunch of Florida flats fishers a decade or so ago for their low visibility in skinny water. The company now makes multiple additional lines with a second patented polyurethane coating and a variety of low-stretch cores, including gel-spun, for a broader range of modern fly fishing opportunities. As noted earlier, most of the polyurethane lines I’ve fished handle well and are quite durable, but mike out a bit larger than PVC-coated lines.
Recently, two more new companies have emerged to compete for anglers’ hearts, minds, and dollars. Montana’s 406 Fly Lines (area code 406, get it?) addresses a perceived need for suppler, accurately weighted lines tailored to softer bamboo and fiberglass rods. (Cortland’s Sylk and RIO’s Light Line fall in this category, as well.) The company has taken what they feel are the best of “vintage” tapers and have had lines made to those dimensions with modern coatings by Scientific Anglers. They’re a subtle olive/tan color and are offered in double-taper as well as weight-forward configurations in line weights 3 through 8. Every line is made precisely to AFTMA specifications, rather than overweighted, as is becoming the trend for lines on stiff, fast-action rods. So a 4-weight will be 140 grains, and a 6-weight will be 160. The weight-forward floating 4-weight and 5-weight versions I’ve cast are sweet trout lines, with smaller diameters than I expected for lines that float so well. It will be interesting to see whether they catch on.
ARC Fishing’s new fly lines are built around low-stretch cores with nanomolecules of PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene — a totally hydrophobic solid) incorporated into their polyurethane coating, like Airflo lines. The lines are grooved, again à la Airflo’s Ridge lines, for distance and easy shooting, and have a slightly harder, different-colored, lower-compression material at the high-wear haul and running zones. Lines are marked with their specs ahead of the back loop. Come to think of it, that all sounds like Airflo, so I’m guessing that’s who’s making the lines for ARC. Where they differ from Airflo, presumably, is in their tapers. ARC offers half a dozen weight-forward models for fresh and salt water. I’ve not cast an ARC line, but have heard positive comments.
Beyond cores and coatings, the nitty gritty of fly lines is taper . . . but that’s a subject for another day.
In the meantime, let’s all hope that El Niño will arrive early and with enough rain to put every river in the state out of its low-water misery. My fingers are crossed that this will be the last time I wish for unfishable high water, but I’m betting it won’t be, dammit.
