Skagit Line

Color: Yellow Head/Green Running Line

Loop on Tip End for loop to loop connection to Skagit Cheaters and/or Sink Tip
Overall Length: 120ft       Head Length: 27ft   
Perfected by legendary steelhead guides, Scott O'Donell and Mike McCune, this weight forward line is designed for "Skagit Style" casting. It incorporates a short, heavy shooting-head type line with a fast sinking tip for presenting very large, weighted flies to fish that are lying deep in the currents.  With one of these lines, a 5' Cheater and a 15' sinking tip the head length will be 47'.  The head on this line is 7'-8' shorter than the popular WindCutter line of the same weight.  The compact design allows easier casting of large flies and requires a shorter "D" loop which will appeal to beginners or anglers working around stream bank vegetation.  This is currently the most popular two-hand-rod line in the Pacific Northwest.  It is also a proven line for fishing all sizes of flies in the wind. Sinking tips are especially effective in the wind.  For fishing flies close to the surface in hard winds, try an intermediate AquaLux tip.  All Rio sinking and floating tips work well with this line.  Larger diameter tips turn over larger flies and get deeper.  Eleven and twelve weight tips are regularly used with 450-grain and larger Skagit Speys.  Other popular sinking tips are made from 9'-13' Rio T-14.  Cheaters can be added to lengthen the belly of this line.  Adding a Cheater will also increase the weight of the head and change the load-point in your rod.  New this year are 350, 400, 500, and 600-grain sizes of Skagit Spey lines.  This will allow an angler to find a line that works perfectly with any rod.  There are also four new Skagit Shooting Heads available for anglers who prefer a certain shooting line other than what comes seamlessly attached as part of the standard Skagit Spey Line configuration..
 More information below.    Cheaters    Tips

Rio Skagit Shooting Head  NEW FOR 2007 !!!
Looped on both ends for attaching shooting line, cheaters & tips.  These lines are made for the angler who wants to use a different type of shooting line than the conventional fly line that comes with the Skagit Spey line (above).  Fore a selection of shooting lines, please refer to our page of Shooting Lines.  The Rio Skagit Shooting Heads are so new they may not be available by the time this is published.

The more that I watch other people fly fish- the more that I am convinced that many of us do not, or cannot, “read the water.” This should be a basic skill. Your catch rate is going to suffer if you are not presenting your fly where fish are holding. I think that perhaps many of us are catching fish as a result of fishing in places that we are familiar with, or perhaps places that someone else has shown us. While this method 

works, we are missing good holding areas as a result of not reading the water.   The first step in reading the water is understanding why fish hold where they do. Trout, Salmon and Steelhead all normally hold in very specific areas for different reasons.  Salmon are transitional, and therefore tend to hold in “resting” areas until reaching their spawning grounds. Try to imagine what the Salmon are enduring while ascending the river to spawn. The Salmon needs to pass through long fast broken water areas in the course of their journey. They seek places to rest as soon as possible after these long and difficult passages. At the “top” of riffles, or, fast water (also called the “head” of a riffle) there is usually a deeper area that offers a refuge of little current which is the first chance of resting after a long and energy consuming run through faster water. Keep in mind that this is “resting” water (as opposed to “holding” water). Salmon, like Trout and Steelhead, prefer to hold in protected water.

This is usually at or near the bottom of a river and can be a depression that has little current or a deep area that has a good deal of structure. Large boulders are the most common structure in many rivers. These fish prefer overhead cover at their holding areas. This is usually thought to be a physical object such as overhanging trees or undercut banks. Many of us fail to realize that a broken water surface (sometimes called “textured water”) is also overhead cover. The key here is that fish are wanting to avoid overhead 

predators, so most any condition that restricts visual contact can be interpreted as overhead cover. Salmon are not here to eat, so keep in mind that they do not need to be in feeding lanes.

We were standing on the banks of the Deschutes River.  The man said, "The fishing would probably improve if we shot all of the mergansers."  I was stunned and am sure that I reacted badly.  Years before I had an even more aggressive reaction to a man who had suddenly pulled a 22-pistol from his pack and shot a merganser from my moving boat.  Why do mergansers receive such disdain from human fishermen?  From my point of view all of the wild life along the river adds to the river experience.  My approach is "live and let live".  I go to wild places because they are wild.  I make as little impact as possible.   Mergansers and the species that we think of as "sport fish" have coexisted for for millions of years. If there has been a recent decline in sport fish, then it seems that another specie is more likely to be the primary cause.
However, now that I have some new photographic equipment to use, I plan on making a a year long study of mergansers that inhabit the many river that I fish.  I am in search of facts: What do they eat?  How do they live?  How do they effect the fish populations that we strive to protect?  
The photo above is cropped from a family group of mergansers that number 8 individuals.  There appears to be quite a bit of social interplay between them.  Expect many more Merganser pictures in the future.

Merganser Links:
Duck Central
USGS
Ducks Unlimited