By Chris Clemmons – Wilderness North Resource Team
Have you ever found a tackle product that truly works as well as the manufacturer says it does?
I’ve been using a product for almost four years called TyGer Leader and it’s the lightest weight leader material I have ever seen. TyGer is also the first stainless steel leader that I’ve come across that has the ability to be tied using virtually any knot used on monofilament.
Several years ago I was fishing Whitewater Lake with some friends from Cabela’s. It was spring so the pike were in shallow, but it was also overcast and cool, so the pike were not very active. In one bay in particular, we saw lots of fish in 3 to 5 feet of water and had several follow our spoons. We knew the fish were there, we just had to figure out how to get them to bite. It seemed like everything we threw at them was too fast and when we tried to slow our presentation down, our steel leaders killed the action of our finesse baits and the pike would simply ignore them. After trying just about everything in our pike arsenal we gave up and went walleye fishing.
Later on that evening when I returned to the cabin, I found all four of the Cabela’s guys huddled around the table tearing apart leaders. It was obvious that they were in the process of inventing something. When I asked what was going on, they excitedly exclaimed that they had returned to our pike spot with no steel leaders but armed with Slug-Go’s and hooked into ten pike.
With no leader hampering the natural action of their lures, the pike had no hesitation accepting their offering but, unfortunately, their monofilament line was no match for the pikes’ razor sharp teeth. The guys were only able to land two of the ten pike and the rest bit them off. That’s why the guys were busy trying to reinvent the leader. Their goal was to create something lightweight to keep their lures as natural as possible but at the same time prevent bite-offs. After more than an hour of tinkering with various lines, wires, chains and leaders, the boys settled on a rig that consisted of a 1×7 stainless steel wire with no barrel swivel and no snap.
The next day, they returned to the pike spot and caught a dozen between 30 and 40 inches. Their lightweight leaders didn’t look too pretty but they did the trick. Too bad TyGer leader hadn’t been invented yet. It would have saved my friends a lot of Slug-Go’s and work.
A year after our trip, TyGer Leader was introduced at the fishing tackle industry’s annual trade show. It won “best of show” for new product. Then, in 2004, TyGer won again for best tackle product introduction in Australia. That’s about the time I started using TyGer and I’ve kept a spool in my tackle box ever since. I like to use it when I’m fishing for pike with Slug-go’s, jigs, Zara Spooks and any time I’m using a lightweight plug, such as a Rapala, to probe the surface.
TyGer is so light and flexible, plugs maintain about 90% of their natural action and the diameter-to-strength ratio is incredible. The other nice feature about TyGer is that you can tie or heat-fuse it directly to your plug and eliminate the weight of the extra component parts that come with a traditional leader.
TyGer Leader comes in 10 to 1000 foot lengths. I like to pack a ten foot spool for my trips to Canada because it’s compact and, unlike traditional leaders, I can cut off the perfect leader length for whatever fishing condition I face. The original nickel color leader is available from 2 lb to 120 lb test and TyGer recently added a whole rainbow of colors in their most popular 15 lb, 30 lb and 50 lb test sizes. Visit www.tygerleader.com, to learn more about this great product. TyGer leader is also available at most major tackle shops throughout North America.
The next time you find yourself faced with unfavorable fishing conditions and pike that seem to only respond to the most natural presentation, make sure you have some TyGer leader in your tackle box. You might like the results.
Chris Clemmon’s articles are a free service of Wilderness North
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