Shooting Heads & Fly Line Sink Tips: Rio & Airflo Shooting Head Fly Lines

Shooting heads, or as many refer to them, shooting head fly lines are a key fly line tool in our quiver of fly fishing tricks here at the Caddis Fly Angling Shop. We fish shooting head fly lines when we are out trying to catch salmon. We fish shooting heads in lakes and other StillWater or semi StillWater fly fishing conditions also. The shooting head fly line is a fly line that is often overlooked nowadays. This is possibly the case because there are so many great integrated shooting head style of fly lines like the Rio Outbound, the Rio Outbound Short. Then there is the Airflo Forty Plus and other Airflo integrated head fly lines. These fly lines offer either floating, intermediate, or sinking tip sections with a smooth transition to a thin level line that one "shoots" during the cast.

Shooting head fly lines offer, in a head that usually ranges from about 30' to about 40', depending on the model, and these fly line heads are then looped onto a shooting or "running" line that could be an Airflo Ridge Running line, a Rio Shooting line, Rio Slickshooter monofilament line, Airflo Miracle Braid line, or some similar shooting/running fly line. ... view more

The key thoughts here is that the shooting head provides the weight to load the fly rod, and the shooting - running fly line simply flows through the guides and allows the shooting head to zoom off into the distance where big lunker salmon, steelhead, bass, or carp might be waiting to chomp our fly.

Many fly anglers prefer the shooting head fly line over integrated shooting head fly lines because they are less expense and allow one to (relatively quickly) un-loop one fly line shooting head and then loop-on a different shooting head fly line, perhaps of a different weight or sink rate.

One could note that many of the fly lines designed for Spey and Switch fly fishing are actually shooting head fly lines designed specifically for Spey and Switch fly rod application.

Sink tips for fly lines are very adaptable and include floating, intermediate, and sinking tips that may be looped onto standard fly lines, Spey fly lines, and Switch fly lines. Sink tips allow one to better balance the weight of a fly line to properly load a fly rod and also are just the ticket to present our fly at the right depth for the fish and fishing conditions we encounter each day on the water.

We stand ready to answer any questions you might have about shooting head fly lines and sink tips for fly lines.