3 Tips for Line Control

Good line control when fishing rivers is essential to success, especially if you're wanting to pull fish from the less pressured pockets of a river. Here are a few tips to point you in the right direction.

1. Forget the tricky stuff, just keep your rod tip up and hold as much line out of the water as you can. When you look at the image above, the only way to fish the back wall (where the fish are of course) is to keep the fly line out of that main centre seam. Yes you could throw a mend upstream but that wont last long, so by keeping the rod high and good contact with the tip of the line drifting that back edge you'll get teh drift you want.

2. Reduce slack and keep it short. In todays world of fly fishing it's easy to get obsessed about casting long lines but often this is to the detriment of good line control. So here's the big one, make shorter casts and work instead on getting the drifts you want.

3. Grease it. To make sure your fly line and the butt section of your leader is sitting nice and high grease it with something like whizz lube or a fly floatant. This will help your fly line to repel water and will keep it floating nice and high, preventing it from getting sucked down with the currents.