Shock tactics

John Goddard explains why and how he incorporates elasticised cord into all his leaders.

Several years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine on the huge advantages Power Gum offered when tied into your leader, but few fly fishers seem to have taken this up. Since the article appeared I have come across but very few fly fishers who have adopted it.

This may have been due to the difficulty in obtaining spools of the material at the time. However, since then the art of pole fishing by coarse fishers has swept the country and as Power Gum is now an integral part of the system, spools are now freely available from most tackle shops.

For those unfamiliar with Power Gum I would describe it as a rubbery type material, slightly opaque and in a natural colour it looks very similar to nylon but about double the thickness of nylon of the same test and it stretches by almost 50%. From some sources it is also available in a deep red colour which can also be useful for use in the leader as a bite indicator. I was first introduced to leaders incorporating this material back in the early 1980s by a very good American friend, Herbert Wellington. He owns a huge cattle ranch of many thousands of acres in Montana through which runs a most beautiful spring creek called O’Dell. This is crystal clear and as it runs through open ranchland with little or no cover, the trout are very spooky and difficult to catch. Over the years, he soon realised the only method that was consistently successful was to use very tiny flies in sizes 18 up to 24, which in those days meant he could only use tippets of 11/2 or 2lb test. But he soon found in practice that nearly all the larger trout many of which were huge browns in excess of 10lb broke his very light tippets in the heavily weeded water.

He, therefore, adopted this Power Gum and since then has lost very few trout. I quickly became a devotee of this material and now never fish without it in my leader. In my early days of fly fishing it was not uncommon for me to lose upwards of a dozen or so trout during a season, mostly when trying to stop them entering heavy weed beds on many of the waters I fish or when striking the trout on a very short line. Since then, I am very upset if I lose more than a couple of trout during a season and even these are usually due to stupid mistakes.

The position of the Power Gum in the leader is critical. Read how and where John does this, and also the other advantages of using it in the September 2008 issue of Fly Fishing and Fly Tying magazine.