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Ask Evan: What gear do I need to replace regularly?
Our partner at Angler Adventures doles out expert advice
Q: WHAT GEAR DO I NEED TO REPLACE REGULARLY?
Evan: There are few lessons as humbling in fly fishing as realizing you didn’t pay attention to your equipment. We can’t control if fish are actively feeding or if the migration is on time. We can’t control the weather. But we can control how securely our knots are tied and whether our setup is in tiptop shape.
Here are a few tips on proactively managing your gear:
1. Your fly line.Keep your fly line clean and replace it as often as possible. Seeing a 10 pound bonefish coming across the bow, leaning back into the perfect double haul and sending up cast in the perfect direction watching as it lands 20 feet short is a terrible way to realize your fly line was dirty or worn out. I replace my fly lines every other trip, if I feel any imperfections or stickiness, or every six months, whichever comes first.
2. Monofilament and fluorocarbon. I don’t use mono or fluoro that’s more than a year old and I replace my leaders if they get knotted. Years ago, I was traveling in the Bahamas with a very experienced angler. He made great casts every time, had great strip sets, and broke off six bonefish in a row. We kept questioning his knot and tippet until we uncovered that his spool mono tippet was several years old and had gone brittle to the point of snapping. I gave him a fresh spool and he didn’t break another fish off for the rest of the trip. A couple spools of tippet and a handful of leaders cost less than one fly line, but may be the most important pieces of tackle to maintain.
3. Flies. Fresh flies are critical because so much can go wrong.Dull hook point. Rusted out eyes. Rusted shank. Broken hook. Unraveling heads. Missing material. Covered in sunscreen. I recommend going through your fly box ahead of any trip and removing any flies not in excellent shape. And anytime I’m fishing in saltwater, I bring an emptyfly box and put all of my used flies into it at the end of the day. I wash the salt off of them in the sink and let them dry in the room. It’s a small step, but it prevents the salt water from contaminating other flies in the box that haven’t been used yet.
4. BONUS: wire. Anytime I’m fishing a subsurface pattern - could be a woolly bugger in Argentina or a rag head in Mexico - I keep a spool of fly-tying wire with me, so I can quickly add weight to get a fly down quicker. Making a couple of wraps might mean the difference between catching a fish and watching it swim past. The best part is that if you need to go back to a light fly, all you have to do is pull the wraps off and you’re back in action - no changing flies, no new knots, no shortening your tippet.
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