knots knots are an intimidating part of fly fishing and they really don't
have to be I'm going to show you the three knots that I think are
the essential knots that you have to know when you're on the Stream
these are my favorites these are also the knots that I have found in years of talking to guides
that most guides use and guides are on the river day in and day out or on a lake around
the ocean day in and day out they want reliable knots so these are the knots that most people
use again there are other knots if you want to explore lots and lots of different knots
sometimes it's fun have at it go nuts but I'm going to show you the knots that I believe in
and that I use on the water one of the things I'd suggest is that pick a knot
and practice it at home practice it at home with good light so that you can almost tie it with your
eyes closed don't practice knots on the river when you want to go fishing do it at home or do it in
a nice quiet place where you can concentrate because you will have to develop some muscle
memory in your fingers to tie these knots properly so just like casting a little practice is going to
help another thing is to always test your knots before you throw your fly out there you always
want to test your knots because even a knot that looks great can fail and so you gotta test it the
other thing to do is you want to wet your knots you want to moisten them with saliva or water
just you know lick them but you want to moisten your knots they'll sink better and eliminate
friction that can heat up the tip of material and weaken the knot so those are the important things
to remember about knots now I'm going to show you those those three knots that I recommend for tying
on a fly the first one is the clinch knot and the clinch knot is very very simple but all you do is
you pass the end of the tip it or leader through the eye of the fly and it doesn't matter which way
you go up or down sideways just pass it through the eye and you form a loop in front of the fly
just by keeping your fingers there in front of it and then you just wrap the tag end the tag
end is the uh the end that you're going to end up cutting off so you just take this tag end and you
wrap it around five or six times and again you'll develop muscle memory so that your fingers will
do what you want them to do eventually and then that Loop that you've been holding in front of
the eye should stay open and then you can pass the end of the leader through that Loop and then you
want to hold the fly and the tag end together and tighten now you don't want to pull on the tag end
you just want to keep it from slipping through that Loop you just want to hold it there in place
and you want to apply pressure on the Fly and the standing part so you're going to wet the knot
and then the best way to tighten all these knots is to just give them a quick firm pull
just like that that will seat those barrels on the knot always test your knots make sure that
they're strong make sure that they'll they'll hold up they're not going to slip out and then
just trim the tag end easy knot you probably if you've fished it all you probably use the clinch
knot that's the knot I use to tie on all my flies well most of my flies there are some exceptions
but we won't talk about those here ninety percent of the time I'm using a clinch knot the next
knot you need is you need to attach two pieces of tipping material you're gonna break tip it you're
gonna have to extend your tippet you're going to need to tie two pieces of leader material or tip
of material together you need to know how to tie a surgeon's knot it's important and this is the
knot not only is it this the knot you would use to attach two pieces of tippet putting a new tippet
on your leader but it's also a great knot for adding droppers so if you're adding a second fly
onto your leader you can also use this same knot so it's very very useful this is a triple
surgeon's knot this is the knot I like to use for for tying on tipping so let's do it so I
got two pieces of material here what you want to do is overlap these two pieces I don't know
about three or four inches go a little bit longer when you're starting out and then I like to wet it
just helps keep the ends together when you're tying this and this is going to be this side is
going to be my tippet okay this is the this is the piece that's going to attach to the fly the other
side is going to go to the rest of my leader and my fly line so all you do is you first form a loop
just a simple Loop like so and then you take that tippet and the the short strand that goes with it
and you go around the loop three times so one you got to make sure that both ends go through two
three
now very important although this is an easy knot to tie it needs to be tightened properly as all
knots and to tighten this properly you need to make sure that you're holding both long ends and
both short ends tightly if you lose control of one of those ends then not can fail it's not going to
seat properly not going to tighten properly so again just like with all knots you wet it
and then you hold all four ends making sure that you've got a good grip on them and then
as with all knots give it a quick firm pull to tighten like so and that is the triple surgeons
and then of course you're going to snip both of the short ends off but that is the surgeon's knot
so there's one more knot that you might need and that's a knot to tie a loop into a piece of leader
material you don't use it that often but it's a good idea to know how to put a loop in the end of
a leader and so this is the Perfection Loop and this is a little tricky or not but you start and
you bring the short end back around the long end behind it and then you take a loop around
again go completely around so that you have a big loop and a little Loop and then you take
this tag end and you flip it over to The Far Side between the loops and then you pull the short Loop
through the long Loop you have a Perfection Loop so don't agonize over knots they're not that hard
pick one pick the one that you like if you want to use different knots than I do that's perfectly
fine try them out try them all out see which is easiest for you to tie but you need to have some
knot to attach a fly and some not to attach two pieces of leader material practice them at home
get comfortable with them and you'll have a lot more fun and be a lot more relaxed on the water
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