Monday Tips and Techniques: Nymph rigging

Good Monday morning to you!
Here's today's Monday fly fishing tip and technique for the last week in March 2012, wow is this year flying bye! While we're really looking forward to writing a weekly tips and techniques blog, it's going to be quite difficult. Our readers range from literally no fishing experience all the way to highly advanced but we will try our best!!

Let's start off with a tip on rigging your nymphs since Idylwidle Jimmy Leg's and wire worms are kicking butt on the Bow River right now (both available here).

Idylwilde Jimmy Legs-Brown

Bead Head Wire Worm-red

Continue reading by clicking Read More below.
Fishing multi-nymph rigs typically results in a few things. 1) Losing a lot of split shot. 2) Tangling a lot of flies. 3) A lot of time spent not fishing. At a recent Saturday Seminar, a very wise guide dropped some knowledge on the audience. He demonstrating a  technique that significantly reduces problems 1 through 3 resulting in a happier angler.
A very common nymph rig is as follows:

Using this rig, the indicator is placed above the flies based on water depth. Try to estimate the water depth, times by 1.5 and use that distance between your flies and indicator to get your flies to the correct depth. For a three fly rig, a combo such as above gives you a lot of variety in the size, shape and type of bug your fishing which I like ALOT but you can use whatever flies you wish just try to put the heaviest flies at the bottom and the lightest at the top of the rig, separating each fly by about 18 inches. Flies can be attached eye to eye or eye to shank, I prefer eye to eye to get a more horizontal drift for each fly. The weight can be put above the flies in order to get the flies down to the bottom without getting the bottom fly constantly stuck on the bottom.
It works yes but here's what I consider a better rigging technique:

Firstly, you'll notice two flies rather than three resulting in 2/3rds the tangles. Each fly and the split shot are on independent strands of mono allowing "free floating flies". Use blood knots or surgeons knots to create each branch. Make sure you tie knots above and below the split shot to keep them in place and ta-da! A rig that's easy to assemble, easy to re-assemble (after you break off the biggest trout of your life) and works like magic! Even with 3 flies, (in which we normally wouldn't recommend split shot as well), your number of tangles goes down quite dramatically. Leave the super supple 3X at home, get some 6 -8 lb maxima, and your time on the river is going to be spent fishing, rather than smoke pouring out of your ears...

What do you think of this way of rigging? Have you ever tried it?
We hope you got something out this blog, stay tuned for our next Monday tip and technique!