broken-fish.net

Well, after having a heck of a time trying to do a decent chironomid presentation without using any indicator, I decided that its time to try.

First decision, what to use?
Strike indicators come in a variety of forms… from clumps of yarn to balsa or cork floats to glow-in-the-dark putty’s.

Apparently putty’s can stain your fly lines, so I think I’ll avoid them for now. Balsa or cork floats seem a little heavy duty for the presentation I’m looking for, and might make it a little more difficult to detect a subtle hit.

Okay…so yarn it is. Well, not so fast…there are a few varieties there, so I thought let’s be cheap. Can I make my own? A quick Google and I had the answer. And there are still a lot of ways of doing it.

For my indicators, I used the following materials:

• I picked up a couple packages of Rug yarn…its a synthetic yarn that is precut into 2.5″ strips. For a larger hook presentation, these might end up being a little small, but I think that for fishing with chironomids, they’ll be just fine. I suppose adding a couple extra strands and some floatant will help as well.
• small elastic band (on my first version)
• black tying thread
• green heatshrink

My first indicator (bottom right in the picture below) I initially tried by simply wrapping the loop with thread, as described over at flyfisherman.com, a bit of thread and heatshrink to create the loop, but I wasn’t happy with the finished product. After seeing the method described over at the GFF site, I went out and picked up a pack of 7/16″ O-rings, and passed the yarn through the O-ring, folded the yarn in half, then bound it with thread. Pretty simple, and I think it will work well. I then soaked the yarn in dry fly floatant.

For the second indicator (bottom left), I used only 3 strands of yarn… 2 green and 1 yellow. And I used thread and heat shrink to bind the yarn together, and then thread to create the loop, and a few drops of head cement, then soaked the yarn in dry fly floatant.

Heres how they turned out (the bottom ones are the home-made models):

The commercial ones are amazingly simple. No tying at all…they just use very small o-rings, and a larger one to fasten the leader to/through. However, a package of 4 was $5.99. The couple that I made cost around 30 cents…and I’m sure that would be even less if I can find a better source for the O-rings. The ones I used were 7/16″ Moen replacements, for about $1.20/pkg of 4.

Here’s how the indicators are attached to your line:

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