Fly Fishing Knots

LEFTY KREH has been teaching knot tying alongside casting and fly fishing techniques for longer than most of us have been fly fishing. He's also written at least three important books on knot tying. He started with Practical Fishing and Boating Knots in 1975, then followed up with Practical Fishing Knots in 1984, and then in 2004 published Fly Fishing Knots and Connections. It's satisfying to see him continue to improve on a good thing with Fishing Knots.

The new book is hard/spiral bound, which means you can open and lay it flat on a table while experimenting with knots. More importantly, it includes a high-quality DVD of Lefty explaining and tying several important knots and connections, including the Blood Knot, the Albright, the Clinch and the Kreh Loop (considered by most to be the best loop knot for smaller diameter leader material).

1. To start the perfection loop, hold the standing line in one hand, and with your other hand create a loop about one-and-a-half inches in diameter that crosses behind the standing line. Pinch the two lines with your thumb and index finger to hold them in place.

ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR I conduct part of my fly-fishing school out on the flats, where my students and I can spread out to hunt for bonefish. During these sessions, I see all kinds of fly-rod and fly-line combinations, along with a great variety of rigging methods, leader constructions, and knots. Some are very good; some not very good at all.

On one particular day during an incoming tide, several large schools of bonefish roamed around the "classroom." A few anglers were hooked up, but I noticed one guy who had been fighting the same bonefish for a while. He had the fish in close, but the bone always managed to remain a few yards out of reach. Walking toward the guy, I spotted his problem from 20 yards away: The knot joining the fly line to the butt section of the leader was too big to pass through the rod's tip top, and the length of the leader allowed the fish to swim out of reach.

FOR MANY ANGLERS, the process of tying big game leaders means beginning each leader with two bimini twists in either end of the class tippet. While this is still an excellent foundation for leader systems, there is an easier way to achieve strong leader connections, and one that in our experience is more reliable when tying on the water and under what we like to call "more-than-favorable conditions" — being surrounded by fish.

We first started tying an early version of the Slim Beauty back in the early 1990s in the Key West area. The idea for the knot began in the 1970s with a desire to develop a knot similar to the jam knot that was quicker to tie but just as strong as Bimini-to-Huffnagle or Bimini-to-Albright knots.