Line Preferences

[Riverkeeper]

Most of my limited salmon and steelhead fishing has been done with weight forward lines, often with some kind of sinking leader arrangement to get down. But all of my trout reels are lined with double taper lines, and in my opinion cast much better. Does anyone fish with double taper lines on their 7-8-9 weights? I realize that I may not be able to shoot as far, but roll casting and short casts are often more important to me than distance. Would there be any disadvantages? Thanks for your input.

[santiamflyguy]

you might want to try one of the longbelly steelhead/salmon lines out there.

they have a 55-60' WF taper, which lets you roll cast pretty darn far and also carry a lot of line into your backcast.

the setup i had and wish i still did was a 9'6" 7wt Scott SAS with an Orvis Wonderline Longbelly WF6F...

i have a st. croix legend 9'9" 6wt and cortland 555 right now, and i would trade it in a minute for the old setup...

[SSPey]

I fish a DT on all my freshwater setups up to 8 weight. There is a slight disadvantage of a few feet shooting distance, but that few feet is more than made up for if you learn to carry line in the air. See what the competition casters use when they are required to hit a target at distance....

Plus, you get to reverse the line when one end wears out.

I'm a diehard DT fan

[Ifishsum]

I started with DT on a trout setup on the advice of a friend, have tried WF since in both trout and steelhead wts and have been much better luck casting the DT. Probably just cause that's what I'm used to but I now use it exclusively (with floating lines anyway).