Back in “the day” when rods were cut from greenheart, ash or hazel, when rod guides where “rings,” reels were made from walnut or mahogany, and lines were braided from silk, there came an angler on the scene who wrote under the pseudonym of Jock Scott. He was an Atlantic salmon fisher, as his pen name aptly implies, and his prowess with the long rod made him the acclaim of the Empire.

Jock could cast like few since have been able to master, and he could catch fish. His writings are filled with a variety of tactics, but it is his Greased Line method that grasped the attention of his peers in “the day.”

The basic premise is rather simple: grease up a fully dried silk line so that it would float really high, cast down and across and add on-the-water mends as necessary to keep the fly moving at the desired speed. That’s still the underlying methodology, but it’s no longer necessary to grease up our high-floating, microsphere-embedded-plastic-coated-marvels-of-modern-technology. So that’s where we start. A good floating line should be cleaned occasionally, but even an inexpensive one floats better than a greased silk line. So floatability is not an issue. Taper can be.
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Regardless of line taper and/or head length, two-handed or one-handed sticks, the tactic is the same, and it’s totally mend driven. By that I mean that it’s not just a floating line cast down and across and allowed to swing. Rather it’s a floating line cast down and across and allowed to undergo a controlled swing. The trick is all in the control. Fly fishing is all about control — to control the fly and make it perform as desired, the angler must control the line. To control the line, the fly rodder has to control the rod. To control the rod, the fisher must control what the arm is doing. This is just as true in mending as it is in casting.

In the Greased Line Tactic the fly rodder controls the speed of the swing by the size, shape, placement and timing of the mends. The idea is to keep the fly moving at a constant (uniform) speed throughout the swing, whether it be a fast swing, a nice medium one, or a slow arcing motion.

The line is cast down and across so that it can swing. The angler has in mind the speed of the swing that is necessary, or at least the speed that is to be tried. If the drag induced by the flowing water is not sufficient to make the fly swing fast enough, the caster mends downstream, introducing a larger downstream bow and thereby increasing current pressure against the line. If the currents are moving the fly too fast, the line is mended upstream to reduce the downstream bow in the line and thereby decrease drag pressure.

It should be obvious now, how size, shape, placement, and timing of the mends effect fly speed: large mends increase speed greater that small mends; a bow-shaped mend increases speed greater than a flat-line mend; throwing the mend on the fastest currents increases speed more than tossing the mend on slower currents; placing the mend closer to the fly introduces drag sooner than mending closer to the angler; and if the mends are not put in at the right time, the fly’s speed will be all over the board.

Well, what is the right speed? Hard to describe, really, and it can vary. So the best suggestion is try different swing speeds. One spring, I was fishing Russia’s Umba for Atlantic salmon, and I decided to try every salmon tactic that I knew, just to see them in action, and to see what worked the best. Of course, because of its fame, the Greased Line was on the top of the list. It certainly proved effective, too, although I caught fish on every tactic, including dead drifting a mouse pattern. But there was a certain satisfaction in the Greased Line. The mends had to be just right to keep the fly moving at a medium speed. It could not break the surface, and it could not go so slow as to sink. Rather it had to run about a foot down and move just fast enough to keep it in that zone.

The take was always the same. First, a humping of the water would appear behind the fly as the salmon moved in. Not the time to strike. Then came the nerve jangling “follow,” which sometimes ended in the fish refusing the fly and sometimes a take. If a refusal, the drill was to try another pattern immediately. Failing that, we’d rest the pool and try again. The take was always very positive — a strong heavy pull. And that was all that was necessary. Striking by raising the rod was merely a formality, meant more to get the line up than to jab the iron home. I learned very quickly to maintain the proper speed by the feel of the current pull against the line. Even in the twilight of the midnight sun, I had no problem taking Atlantics on the Greased Line.  

Mending properly also depends on the position of, and the speed of, the currents under the line. In the classic stream profile that we picture, the currents are slower along the edges and fastest in the middle. But in reality, this is rarely the case. If the current on the angler’s side of the stream is wide and slow, and the fly is cast into a rather narrow slot of faster-moving currents, then the line has to be mended down much more briskly to slow down the speed of the fly rather than to increase its speed. Mending strongly up in such a situation will initially speed up the fly’s swing and then “hang” it at the edge of the fast water.

Jason and I were fishing Russia’s Sederovka for huge browns, when we stumbled into a run of Atlantic salmon. A couple of fish showed at the edge of a fast slick, and they looked like they needed some exercise. Jason cast the line across the slick behind the boulder, and then mended the line onto the top of the rock. The rock acted just like a slow current and held the line from moving downstream as fast as the fly. The imitation swung over the fast current tongue and parked itself in the slick. A particularly hot salmon grabbed the fly and engaged in a rather stunning exercise routine.

Ok, Ok, that’s Russia. Well, there are Atlantics in the Midwest, and certainly steelies, big browns and Pacific salmon respond to this tactic, too. The fly can be fished with the traditional, just-subsurface swing, waked on the surface, or shot can be added and the fly swung deep over the gravel. However it’s done, the Greased Line is still a most effective tactic, even in “this day.” 

Gary Borger’s column on Techniques and Tactics appears regularly in Midwest Fly Fishing magazine. This article ran in the July 2008 issue of our publication.