Techy Thursday - Di what?

Here's a key piece of advice from the John Horsey clinic that will help you start getting into more fish when on the lake.

"Something I come across regularly while guiding is a reluctance to use sinking lines. Many of my clients do not possess good quality sinking lines which inevitably means they never get down to the fish when they are feeding deep. Some do not even own a sinking line. While I concede that most anglers prefer to use floaters, if you are to achieve any consistency when boat fishing you must have a range of sinking lines."

As a starting point for gearing up to effectively fish lakes the Airflo 40+ family will have the go-to lines that will see you covered for most situations, without breaking the bank. The four essential lines to have are 40+ Fast Intermediate; 40+ Di3; 40+ Di5; 40+Di7 each offering you different sink speeds and opportunities to target fish at different depths or retrieve speeds.

Di stands for "Density Intensified" which is a fancy way of saying dense as, therefore sinks quick as. And the 3, 5 and 7 all represent the different sink rates in inches per second, so Di3 = 3ips and so on.

To help further explain the sink rates here's an excerpt from an article on loch style fishing that Rene wrote a while back:

"The final factor to understand in your retrieve is the sink rate of your flies and line and the depth that you are wanting to fish at. For example an ultra fast sinking line such as a Di-7 _7 inches per second) will sink quickly into the fish catching zone and will normally require a quick retrieve to keep the flies off the bottom. In contrast if fishing an intermediate sink line (normally around 1.5 inches per second) you will need to slow your retrieve down in order to get your flies into the fish catching zone, of course if you are wanting to slowly crawl a team of nymphs that may be exactly what you are wanting your line to do and the intermediate will be the best choice."

Here's a bit more info on the lines in video form: