To begin with, the title of this thread seemed rather surprising to me, since most tippet material is nylon monofilament. What matters is not the size of the spool that it comes on, but rather the diameter, stiffness, and strength.
My leaders nowadays are almost all made up of monofilament line, but by paying close attention to diameters. I still use the old 60-20-20 formula as the basis. That is, the leader is 60% butt, 20% taper, and 20% tippet. The butt diameter should be 2/3 the line tip diameter. When tapering down, if using blood knots, one should not step down more than .002 of an inch from one section to the next, especially with the smaller diameters. The double surgeon’s knot is a bit more forgiving and easier to tie. Nevertheless, I have recently gone back to using blood knots, except for the tippet and the last section of taper, instead of double surgeon’s knots, and nail knots for connecting the leader butt to the line.
Figuring out the 60-20-20 formula is quite simple. When working in inches, for a 100- inch leader I use 60 inches for the butt, figure out how many sections will be needed in the taper and divide that number into 20 inches. Therefore, if it calls for 3 sections in the taper, 7 inches for each section works out to 21 inches, and that’s close enough. Then a 20 inch section of tippet finishes it off.
Another interesting point that came up is whether mono floats or sinks. In my experience, since it is heavier than water, it sinks… with a bit of help. An interesting experiment is to cut a 2-inch piece of mono and put it into a glass of water. What happens? It floats on the surface film. But it you take your fingertip and gently push it down just through the surface film and then remove your fingertip, what happens? It sinks… slowly.
Various fishermen have recommended and used different methods and solutions for breaking the tension of the surface film. One that I have used is to apply a bit of hand soap to the leader, which functions as a surfactant and breaks the tension. Nowadays of course that would not be considered ecologically correct. Flourocarbon does seem simpler.
|