The Art of Tippet Rings

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Date: 01/01/2025

Tippet Rings have been around for several years, first made popular by the good folks at Feathercraft in St. Louis to go with their proprietary braided leaders. Gradually, folks started using them for a variety of other situations, including European nymphing, Tenkara, and now they have become more mainstream in the standard nymphing world too. Personally, I fought the trend for years but recently succumbed to the power of “The Ring” out of necessity more so than practicality.

We experienced a prolonged, hot summer with very low and clear water from early July through late August. The fishing just simply got tough for a lot of reasons and we were forced to think “outside of the box” many a day. I started to run short nymph rigs using tippet rings to bridge the gap between a heavy butt section and a light tippet section. Essentially the leader looks like 2’ of 20 lbs. attached to a tippet ring and then 3’ of 5x with one end attached to the tippet ring and the other to the first fly. The indicator goes above the tippet ring so there is no need to worry about slippage, as this is thicker diameter material. Then I tie a point fly on per your standard nymph rig (I typically tie my droppers “eye to eye”). I vary the weight according to the situation, as always and tend to place the shot 12-18” above the first fly.

The advantage of the tippet ring in this setup has to do with being able to fish fine tippet on a relatively short rig. Small flies sink faster and drift more naturally when using fine tippet. Also, this is essentially a 90-degree rig, so the drift works out to be pretty true from the start of the drift. This system works wonders on places like the upper Madison where the fish see a lot of flies and an angler is dealing with fishing multiple current seams throughout the water column.

We are always messing around with new ways to get some fish in the boats on our guided fly fishing trips here in Bozeman. Sometimes they work for awhile and sometimes they are just a complete disaster (try overfilling a water balloon as an indicator sometime). The tippet rings are definitely here to stay and are an easy way to mix things up when you are nymphing tricky water.