Heavyweight Champions

England international ben bangham looks at the options available when there’s the need to fish hard on the bottom for winter grayling.

- Ben Bangham

Sometimes it takes mega weights to get your flies down to the right depth to catch what you want. This is normally due to a couple of factors that present themselves in winter more than summer – depth and current. The extra water that is normally around at this time of year means the rivers we fish get deeper and the current gets quicker. With French nymphing, as many will know, the window that the flies actually fish in is fairly small. Plus, if your flies are out of the ‘strike zone’ due to being too far off the bottom, then it’s even shorter!

The challenge is to maximise the time the flies are in the strike zone; sounds simple enough. There are two ways in which you can do this; increase the weight of the flies to accelerate the rate of descent, or decrease the resistance that is present in your flies and leaders so they again sink quicker and get to the desired depth.

Thin Leaders

Let’s look at the leader setup first because this is one that we don’t normally think about too much. How can we adapt our leaders to make the flies sink quicker? The easiest way is to decrease the diameter of the tippet material that you use. This means that it cuts through the water easier than the thicker diameters. To many people this sounds as though it wouldn’t make too much difference, but it really does. When you have six feet or so of tippet and you are trying to sink 0.04mm over the whole nine feet or so that’s in the water it makes a huge difference.