Frank Church wrote:

Picked up a new book today "Smallmouth Flyfishing" by Tim
Holschlag...pretty neat book, especially since he includes my all time
favorite smallie bug, the Sneaky Pete in his top 100 bass flies. Right away
that marks him as an expert. ;-) He touts furled leaders as the way to go
over the usual leader that most of us use. He pointed to www.BlueSkyFly.com
as the place to get them, and they give some valid sounding reasons as to
why they are the way to go. How about some opinions of those who have used
them and why you think they are better than standard leaders. I'm talking
here of hefty leaders for bass not some dinky trout types. First week in
June is looming larger and I may score a couple of these for use on the
John Day river. So fire away folks....

Pretty much everyone on ROFF hates them but me. :-) Even at that,
I don't use them all the time. I roll my own from Unithread, and I've
made some for bass fishing using 3/0 thread, but I've found that I
hardly use them for bass. They are better suited for times/places where
delicate presentation is important, IMHO.

As for the bluesky hype -- it's overblown, but what do you expect
from someone who's trying to market the things? :-) IMHO, it doesn't
make sense to make furled leaders out of mono. I've found the biggest
advantages of furled leaders to be easy/delicate turnover of the fly and
lack of memory/suppleness. But leaders made of mono have a tendency to
coil just like their extruded cousins, so that defeats one purpose for
using them.

Some folks say they collect water and spray too much, but I treat
mine with Mucilin and haven't noticed any real problems with that.

Frank Jr. evidently tried them in sub-freezing weather and wrote
about them being like casting icicles or javelins or some such. :-)

Personally, I used them on my trip last year to NC about half the
time, and I caught my second biggest fish of the trip while I was using one.

If you're intent on trying them, ping me off-group and I'll see
about making up a couple for you to play with. One of the cool things
about rolling your own is you can play around with different colors. I
even made up a camo (olive and black thread intertwined) version once
just for kicks. :-)


Chuck Vance (but I haven't made any of orange thread yet)