The Speed Knot

19 comments / Posted on / by

Photo by Louis Cahill

Little things make a difference.

When you watch a really good fisherman you notice a lot of those little things, the details that add up to kicking ass on the water. My friend Will Sands is like that. One of those super technical fisherman who has thought through the smallest details.

I’ve always liked the way Will ties a clinch knot. The first time I saw him do it, it was so fast it looked like magic. In a day of fishing to picky trout where you change flies a lot I wouldn’t be surprises if it added up to an extra thirty minutes of fishing, and Will can catch a lot of fish in thirty minutes.

Will slows it down for you in this video.

Thanks to Taylor Creek Fly Shopfor lending Will to me for an afternoon.

 
Louis Cahill
Gink & Gasoline
www.ginkandgasoline.com
hookups@ginkandgasoline.com
 
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19 thoughts on “The Speed Knot

  1. Whoa! As I have gotten older and my vision has gotten worse, I spend way too much time tying and re-tying clinch knots. This tip is great! I can’t wait to try it. Thanks, guys. By the way, the folks at Taylor Creek have been great for decades!

  2. I’ve been doing this for years!

    Just showed a guy a couple of weeks ago how to do this, including the dropper.

    Great video and thanks for continuing to educate the flyfishing community!

  3. I think whatever time you make up on this version of the clinch is lost when you have to tie on more tippet because of the length of the tag end on this. Or maybe its a zero sum game, I’m only guessing. JGR

  4. That is the ONLY way to tie on a dropper. I’ve been doing that since a guide friend showed me about two years ago. As for JGR (above), he was very generous with the tag end in the video. The point is spinning around on your finger and then feeding through the loop instead of twisting the fly around or manually rotating the tippet around itself 5 or 6 times. If you do this for your dropper you will never look back.

    • I’m really glad you guys like this. Will is full of cool tricks like this. I wish I could get him to do more, but he hates being on video. You can tell, I know.

      The loop idea is a good one. I just tried it and with a little practice you can tie a no slip mono loop the same way. Pretty cool!

  5. I like this tip and have always used my hemostat (instead of my finger) to twist and tie this knot – it sure does save a ton of time. Great tip!

  6. Will was a great choice for this, so glad you got him to do it. He know’s his stuff, and is a solid guide and angler. Good to see him get a little more lime-light!

  7. Sweet; also, he’s using a great dry – dry combo. tie that stimi body like Charlie C. does and it will never sink.

  8. RE: Tippet Waste — I’ve heard people say this on youtube videos and elsewhere, and my best advice is “chill man”. This is fishing — you aren’t saving the world, buying anyone a coke, or anything like that. You’re doing something for ‘you’, and you alone. Sure — minimize your impact as much as possible, but in the end — the stream and fish are happier with NO fishermen stepping in and bothering them, period. I could make similar argument that you should only tie super-high strength knots to prevent breaking off flies on the bottom, which litters the stream just as much as a tiny piece of mono clipped and discarded by a fisherman. This doesn’t include trampling the stream bottom, breaking off line in a tree where you can’t possibly retrieve the scrap line, breaking off flies in a fish’s mouth, or….pumping a lot of $ into “plastic streams”, where the heavy management of (mostly) non-native trout species is so severe that the stream doesn’t even resemble what it would otherwise look like without human intervention.

    Get real — and take up photography instead if you are really that worried about impacting a stream.

    Comments like this make me want to leave my clippings along the bank and take more trout home to the skillet — which isn’t your intended effect.

    TB

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