Reply To: Euro sighter question

To answer your question in a nut shell the answer is – keep the “sighter” out of the water while you ESN. Here’s some reasons why.

1. The sighter, if made of different material or is a thicker diameter than your tippet being used, will not drift correctly underwater (too thick of a diameter could slow the sink rate of the flies or slow the drift).

2. The sighter should always be out of the water so I would extend the tippet if going to fish in a deeper hole. In other words can’t be lazy – add more tippet and hold your sighter a little higher in the water.

3. Your tippet below the sighter should be the smallest you can get away with – one of our guys was shown how to do it with the tutelage of Jason Randall and caught a 21 inch brown on 7X tippet. It can be done!

4. Some of the latest techniques are using a paint contained in a Sharpie like pen to mark the tippet. So the entire leader is tippet with fluorescent paint used as the sighter

5. We just finished our advanced nymphing class – our next class will be ESN techniques. Watch for it