The Best Leader-to-Fly Connection You Can Have
Fluorocarbon tippet has recently become very popular for fly fishing tippet material, even though the price is substantially higher than that of nylon material. Nothing beats practical experience and those that use fluorocarbon usually end up preferring it, especially when it comes to fishing nymphs and other flies fished below the surface of the water. Some use it for subsurface flies only and use nylon for dry flies. This probably represents the majority of those that use fluorocarbon tippet material.
The first thing anglers try to do, when getting familiar with fluorocarbon, is to try to compare it with nylon they have most likely been using for years. Nylon is slightly better on wet knot strength, but by very little. Nylon has a slightly higher dry breaking strength, but after soaking in the water, fluorocarbon has a slightly higher breaking strength.
Fluorocarbon monofilament is almost impervious to water. Its physical properties change very, very little after it has been in the water soaking a long time. The breaking strength of wet fluorocarbon monofilament remain essentially the same as dry fluorocarbon, and so does the stiffness of the material. It has more memory that nylon.
It is generally thought that fluorocarbon tippet tends to sink and hot float on the surface as well as nylon tippet. That isn’t actually correct, except in very large sizes. Fluorocarbon has a specific gravity in the range of about 1.80. It isn’t as dense as lead but it is significantly more dense than nylon. Test prove that just like nylon, it isn’t dense enough to quickly break surface tension and sink even in it’s smaller diameters. For all practical purposes, fluorocarbon has little benefit over nylon as far as being able to break surface tension.
Perfect Fly No-See-Um Fluorocarbon Tippet is 100% fluorocarbon and the best fluorocarbon tippet you can buy. Our spools of tippet have 25 yards of material. Each spool is enclosed in a clear plastic container to provide additional protection. It can be removed for the container and placed on a tippet holder or stored in the plastic container.
