Here is some great advice from some Orvis guides and experts on when to use floating line or sink tip line when fishing streamers. I thought there were some great thoughts and ideas here and would help all of us when we are fishing streamers this fall.
Joe Demalderis, Cross Current Guide Service (Milford, Pennsylvania): With streamers, I’m often banging the banks from a drift boat when the water is higher than normal and/or dirtied up. If it’s significantly higher, I’ll use a sinking tip, if not too high, a floating line is fine. Either way, the Bank Shot line is made to order for this. There are also occasions when the water isn’t that high, but for softness of presentation I want a unweighted fly. Under those conditions, a sinking tip with fluorocarbon leader is the ticket.
When swinging wet flies, I prefer to use one bigger/heavier fly and a dropper that is smaller and softer. I try to avoid adding weight to the leader and prefer to get flies deeper by mending and using a longer tippet section that will get down quicker. The heavy fly is my edible weight, and the dropper is my fly du jour or hatch-matcher.
There are times of high water with extra swift currents when I’ll add some sink putty to the leader instead of shot. The putty gets hung up less, casts nicer, and if it does hang up you can usually save your flies and just lose the putty. Sinking tips come into play for me when the water is too deep to effectively get to fish level, but even then, a change of angle with a floating line and proper mending should get me where I want to be most often. Mending is the key when swinging wets and a floating line mends easier and keeps me in contact with my flies better. Jenny Mayrell-Woodruff, Woodruff, Flyfish Beaver’s Bend (Broken Bow, Oklahoma): I use a floating line with split shot more often because I am constantly changing locations on the river. I like the flexibility of managing the depth with split shot, as well as removing the split shot if I need to switch up the method of presentation (dry fly, double dropper rig, etc.). I use sinking lines when my plan is to solely throw streamers in deeper water for the whole day. John Herzer, Blackfoot River Outfitters (Missoula, Montana): Around Missoula, we primarily fish from boats, so we rarely use full-sinking lines or even sinking tips longer than ten feet when fishing streamers. Problem is, you need to get your flies in and out of the water quickly. With an integrated sinking tip or full-sinking line, you need to continue to strip the line all the way in before you can recast. In order to get the proper depth, we lengthen our leaders and fish weighted flies. if that’s not enough, add split shot a couple inches in front of the fly. If we’re really going deep, we slip a worm weight (that’s right, like bass fisherman use) on the leader before we tie on the bug. In both instances, the weight will give the fly a jigging action, which the trout find very attractive.
