Hi All!

OK so there I am all ready to go fly fishing for my first (official, bar my lessons!) trip in Sweden where I now live, I have a nice set up with my new 9 foot 6# Orvis frequently flyer rod with sexy new battenkill II mid arbor.

So I book the boat of Sunday in a lake with lots of rainbow trout, I get a tapered mono something or other leader and manage to match it up with some tippet after reading that the end of the leader should always match the density of the start of the tippet (when tapered)....

Then I go to the tackle shop and the guy tells me i'm wasting my time fishing on the surface at the place I'm going and I want to be looking at at least a sinking leader set up to catch lots of rainbow!

So I went and bought myself another leader that sinks this time, this time a fast sink "loop" leader. The exact details on the packet are:

Loop braided leader
tapered 3-8
L-TT7SFS - LSR16
Length 7' - super fast sink

So I have attached my fly line using a loop to loop connection (something I can just about master!), and then cockily get read to attach my tippet (which by the way is a frog hair 5X 0.152mm diameter tippet) and then..

Shock horror.

It would seem that this braided leader (which has loops at both ends rather than my other mono thingy leader which has loop at the butt end only) is much thicker at the thin end than my old mono thingy leader.

So going back to my books, I recall that this is a bad thing, and that due to the way the force has to travel down the rod in a nice smooth science like way, the end of the leader must match the diameter of the tippet.

(thanks for hanging in there so far!)

So my questions....

a) Why does this braided leader have loops at both ends. Can I do another loop to loop connection to connect my tippet to the leader, or should I use a different knot? What is the best knot to use here (the name will do I can look up how to tie it).

b) The diameter of the end of this braided leader seems to now be ticker than the start of my 5X tippet. Is that bad, good, or neither, and why? How are you supposed to tell which tippet to use for this type of leader? My guess is that the "3-8" mark means that the leader can support tippets of between 3X and 8X (in which case I'm fine?) but that's just a guess!...

Any help will be much appreciated, I want to catch a ton of trout on Sunday!

any ideas on this?

Just as long as the diameter is decreasing from flyline to tippet that's fine. The Loop to loop on both ends of the leader is to loop the thicker end onto the flyline, then as you say to loop the other thinner end onto a tippet. I used to just blood knot tippet onto the end of the braided leader.
Just try things out, and experiment if it doesn't work!

brilliant - thanks this confirms what I was hoping!