In this guide
Part 3 of The Tight Line — my series on fishing a tight-line rig on South Platte tailwaters. Start with Part 1.
Reading the sighter tells you what’s happening at the end of your line. This one is about what you do with that information — because the sighter is a gauge, but your rod hand is the throttle. Every tight-line drift is a small decision, made and remade second by second: am I leading these flies down the lane, or am I following them?
Get that decision right and the rig fishes itself — light contact, flies ticking the zone at the speed the water wants, takes that stand out like a wrong note. Get it wrong and you do the one thing that quietly ruins more euro drifts than bad flies, bad depth, and bad water-reading combined: you tow them.
I learned this the dumb way, which is the only way I seem to learn anything on a river. Contact isn’t a setting you crank to maximum — it’s a dial, and the river turns it for you if you let it. Took me an long time, and a lot of towed flies, to figure that out.
Same rig as the rest of the series — the mono setup on the Diamondback 10’7” 3-weight, a Blowtorch on point, nothing on the surface for the current to grab. Leading and following aren’t fancy add-ons to it; they’re the two halves of drift control, and most days I’m blending both, trading between them a half-dozen times in a single drift without thinking the words. This post is me slowing that down enough to talk about, which is a little like explaining how to ride a bike. Bear with me.
What’s the actual difference between leading and following?
Leading means your sighter is slightly ahead of your flies as they come down the run, and you’re using the rod to meter the pace rather than letting the current dictate it. The tip moves downstream a touch ahead of the bugs, you keep a feather of tension on them, and you walk them through the lane at a speed you choose. The discipline — the part the Modern Nymphing school hammers — is that you lead without ever speeding the flies up: you recover the slack the river feeds you as the rig drifts back, gathering it quietly, while the rod hand asks “are you still down there?” several times a second.
Following means you match the current’s speed and let the flies set the pace. The rod follows downstream right with the rig, no faster, holding just enough contact to feel what’s happening without imposing any of your own speed. It’s closer to a true dead drift — a fly traveling one seam with no influence from you — except you’ve kept a thread of contact so you still feel the eat the instant it happens.
Here’s the part that trips people up, and the part that costs people the most fish: leading is not dragging. Leading controls the pace while the flies still drift freely along the bottom; dragging yanks them up out of the current and skates them. The line between the two is contact, and that line is the whole skill. Think of leading a horse versus dragging a sled — the horse walks at the pace you set but it’s still walking on its own four legs. The sled has given up and you’re providing all the motion. One of those catches fish. The other I did for an long time while wondering why the guys around me were bent over and I wasn’t.
Why leading is the tailwater default
On most South Platte tailwater seams, I’m leading. Here’s why.
The current near the bottom, where your flies should be, moves slower than the surface — friction off the streambed drags it down. (That speed gap is the read I lean on hardest; I broke it down in reading the sighter.) Follow the surface speed your eye naturally tracks and you’re running the flies faster than the slow water they’re sitting in, lifting them off the bottom without meaning to. That’s the cruel trap of the method: your eye is a liar. It locks onto the bubbles and the fast top inch, your hand obediently matches that speed, and your flies get hauled along like a kid dragged too fast through a grocery store.
Leading fixes that. Hold the rig back a hair from the surface current and the flies stay down in that slow bottom seam, drifting at its speed. The Dream Stream taught me this plainly — slow, glassy meadow water full of browns with advanced degrees in refusing flies. I’d watch my sighter scoot along while a fish the size of my forearm finned six inches under it and never turned its head; the flies were doing forty in a school zone. Once I held the rig to the speed of the water the fish actually sat in, those same browns ate — same fly, same spot. The only thing that changed was I quit driving.
Leading also keeps you tight: any interruption — fish, rock, hesitation — telegraphs up the line instantly, and slack is where takes go to die. On these fish a half-second is everything; a Deckers trout tastes a #20 Blowtorch and spits it before the thought has fully formed in its little walnut brain. There’s no “let him take it.” He already took it and gave it back while you were admiring the scenery.
When to follow instead
So if leading is the default, when do you back off and just follow?
Faster water. Step into a quick tongue, a plunge, or pushy pocket water and the current is already moving the flies at or near the speed I’d want; try to lead on top of that and I overcook it and start dragging. There the move is to follow — match the speed, keep light contact, let the heavier water do the work. (I’ll go deep on this terrain later in the series, in pocket water vs. flats.) Cheesman Canyon is where it clicks for me, because one run hands you both: a boulder-strewn riffle that wants a pure follow, then a glassy tail-out below where you’d better switch to leading or you’ll line every fish in it. You can blow that transition without noticing, which I do roughly once an hour, every hour, forever.
You also follow when the fish tell you to. Getting refusals on an even drift, sometimes the most natural presentation is the most passive one — dead-drifting at current speed with the lightest contact, letting the bug tumble like it isn’t attached to anything. On spooky Cheesman-style water, leading can impose a faint tension a wild fish reads as wrong. Stand over a fish you can actually see in clear water (more on hunting them by eye in sight fishing and spotting trout) and watch what your “perfect” leading drift does to it: half the time you’ll catch the faintest flinch, a fish reading a tension so small you can’t feel it in your hand. Back off to a dead follow and it eats. The fish are a more honest critic of your contact than you’ll ever be.
Flow matters too. These are bottom-release tailwaters — Deckers off the Cheesman dam, the Arkansas below Pueblo Dam, the Dream Stream off the Spinney release — so the number on the USGS gauge before you load the truck tells you which game you’re playing. Low and clear, the water’s slow top to bottom and I’m leading almost everything. Bump that same run up with a spring release and there’s real push, the lanes get shovier, and I’m following far more water than I was a month back — same river, same rod, completely different hands. I’ve shown up to a high Deckers carrying last trip’s low-water plan in my head, towed flies for an hour, and driven home sure the fish had left. They hadn’t. I’d just brought the wrong throttle.
The honest answer is I’m rarely doing one purely. A typical drift is a lead through the soft slot, easing to a follow as the rig hits a faster shelf, then a touch of lead again as it slows into the tailout — constantly trading as the water under the flies changes speed. It stops feeling like switching tactics and starts feeling like the rod hand just keeping up with the river. Which is really just reps, most of them wrong.
Get tight early: the tuck cast
None of this matters if your flies aren’t down by the time they reach the fish. Lead or follow, you want to be in contact and in the zone at the top of the drift, not scrambling for it halfway down. The effective part of any drift — the window where a fish actually eats — is a few feet, not the forty-foot float you pictured, so wasting the front of it catching up to your flies throws away half your chances.
That’s the tuck cast. Stop the rod high and abrupt on the delivery so the heavy point fly kicks down and under the leader, driving to depth fast right where the seam starts. By the time the rig reaches the holding water it’s already deep and already tight, and you can pick lead-or-follow from the first foot. A lazy lob lands everything flat, the flies sink late, and the front half of the run is gone before you established contact. (Where in the run you want that depth — the bucket, the shelf lip, the trough — is Part 2.)
The tuck took a long time to stop fighting. My early version was a violent overhand chop that drove the flies down beautifully — at my own feet, three lanes short of where I’d aimed. The fix was thinking about the stop, not the power: a crisp high stop with a hair of slack fed at the very end, so the weight of the bug does the tucking instead of my shoulder. Done right, the point fly snaps down and the sighter settles into a tight little angle the instant it lands. I still throw the wrong one when I’m cold, tired, or — most reliably — when somebody’s watching.
What it feels like — in the sighter and in the hand
This is a feel game as much as a visual one, so here’s what each actually reads like. The short version, for when you’re standing in the river and not reading a blog post:
| What the sighter does | What your hand feels | What it means | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leading | Slightly ahead of the flies, holding a living angle | Faint, steady, feathery weight | You’re driving; a take shows as a stall |
| Following | Follows straight down with the rig, no belly, no skate | Nearly weightless — feeling for the flies | Current’s driving; you’re steering |
| Towing | Bar-tight, outrunning the surface bubbles | Constant dull drag, deadened | Flies are off the bottom — ease back now |
One rule sits under all of them: keep the sighter and leader off the water, rod held a touch higher, especially at the end of the drift. The instant the sighter lies down on the surface it gets grabbed by current you can’t control, the flies lift out of the zone, and strike detection dies. Off-the-water contact is the difference between this method working and it being a weird, expensive way to drag tungsten around.
Leading, done right: the sighter is slightly ahead of where you know the flies are, holding a gentle, living angle — loaded but not bar-tight. In your hand there’s the faintest steady weight, the flies just kissing the rhythm of the bottom. You feel like you’re setting the pace for something, not hauling it. The take is unmistakable against that calm — the sighter stalls, hesitates against the current for a split second, ticks, or just stops doing the smooth thing it was doing. That stall is the eat. Don’t wait to confirm it; set low and toward the bank, and sort out afterward whether it was a fish or a rock. (It’s a rock more than I’d like. Set anyway — a wasted set rolls into your next cast; a missed eat is gone for good.)
Following, done right: the sighter follows straight down with the rig, a soft controlled angle, no belly and no skate. In the hand it’s nearly weightless — you’re feeling for the flies more than feeling them. It looks effortless because it is; the current’s driving and you’re just steering. The trap is the opposite of leading’s: it’s relaxed enough that your brain wanders off to lunch, and a follow with the brain switched off is just slack with extra steps.
Towing — the failure mode: the sighter goes bar-tight and pulls downstream visibly faster than the surface bubbles, and in your hand it’s a constant, dull, deadened drag instead of an alive feathery weight. That’s the tell: the flies have come up off the bottom and you’re water-skiing them over the heads of every fish in the lane. Ease the rod back until the weight goes feathery again.
The flip side is going slack: too passive a follow, the sighter bellies and sags, and the take arrives late because there was loose line to come tight first. Between racing-tight and sagging-slack there’s a narrow band of gentle contact, and living in that band — leading or following — is the entire art.
One last thing the feel game rewards, and it’s free fish: don’t quit at the bottom of the drift. As the rig comes tight at the end, the flies swing up and accelerate toward the surface — the fly climbing through the column like an emerging bug making a run for the top. That rise is the whole point of the Leisenring lift, the old wet-fly move where you deliberately check the drift in front of a holding trout to make the fly stand up and swim. The difference on a tight line is that you don’t have to induce it: the geometry does it for you the moment you stop feeding the drift, whether you meant it or not. So set hard at the end of every drift, even the ones you’d written off — the fish that followed your Blowtorch all the way down the lane is very often the one that eats on the way up. Some of my best Deckers fish came on drifts I’d already mentally finished, which tells you how much of this game is refusing to give up two seconds early.
My take
For years I thought a tight line meant keeping everything tight, so I led every drift like I was steering a kite and towed flies through more good water than I want to admit. The fix wasn’t leading harder or following more. It was letting the water under the flies make the call. Slow seam, I lead and meter the pace; fast tongue, I follow and let the current set it. The day I quit imposing one speed on every kind of water was the day my drifts got honest, because I was finally matching the flies to the river instead of to my idea of a euro drift.
Should I lead the flies upstream or downstream of the rig?
Downstream, and it’s the sighter that goes first. You move the rod tip down-current a touch ahead of where the flies are, so the sighter is at the front of the drift and the flies trail below and behind it — that’s what keeps the rig loaded and in contact. A sighter that has fallen behind the flies means slack, and slack is the thing you’re trying to eliminate. What you’re never doing is hauling the rig back upstream against the flow; that’s towing in the other direction. You’re letting everything run downstream a hair slower than the surface while the rod meters that pace. If you feel yourself holding the rig back hard enough that the flies are fighting upstream, you’ve overcooked it — ease off until they’re drifting down freely again, just under the surface speed.
Is leading on a tight line the same as mending fly line?
No — same problem, opposite ends of the gear. Mending repositions fly line on the surface so conflicting currents don’t belly it and tow your fly. On a tight line there’s no fly line on the water to mend — just thin tippet and the fly’s own tungsten down in the column — so instead of repositioning line you control the drift directly with the rod tip: lead to meter the pace, follow to match it. Mending manages line the current can grab; leading and following manage the flies themselves with nothing on the surface to fight. For tight, conflicting tailwater currents, skipping the surface line entirely is exactly why the method controls a drift so cleanly.
Bottom line
Reading the sighter tells you what’s happening; leading and following are how you control it. Lead through smooth tailwater seams — meter the pace, keep the flies down in the slow bottom current, stay tight enough that a take telegraphs instantly. Follow through faster tongues and pushy pockets where the current already sets the speed. Get tight early with a tuck cast so you can pick your tactic from the first foot, and above all don’t tow: a bar-tight sighter racing the surface with a dull pull in your hand means the flies have left the bottom and you’re fishing over fish. Live in that narrow band between racing-tight and sagging-slack, let the water under the flies decide whether you lead or follow, and the drift starts working for you instead of against you.
Next in The Tight Line → Part 4: The Point-and-Dropper Rig — you can steer the drift now; here’s how to hang two flies off it without giving up the depth you just fought for.