Yorkshire Fly Fishing

This is another of my ‘How I did it’ articles rather than a “How to do it’ but hopefully it will prove useful!

Whilst at Carsington I realised I’d lost my sinkant and upon my return home went online to buy some. To get some more sinkant posted out to me was going to cost 5 or 6 quid all chucked in and with no visits to a tackle shop planned I decided to go down the DIY route. I bought the raw Fullers Earth online from Fishing With Style (based in Leeds), the Glycerin from Tesco, washing up liquid I already had but was left with a dilemma over what to store my finished product in. The oft-suggested 35mm film canister wasn’t really an option seeing as this is 2014, so I settled on a great little Quies wax ear plug container I had kicking around. I figured something with an attached lid would be a lot less hassle, and it’s a nice flat shape.

A recipe I found online suggested 1 heaped teaspoon of Fullers Earth powder, 1 teaspoon of washing up liquid and 1.5 teaspoon of glycerin but this didn’t work for me, it was far too dry.

So my recipe was as follows:

• 1 heaped teaspoon of Fullers Earth 
• 2 teaspoons of Fairy Liquid
• 2 teaspoons of glycerin

*But interestingly I’ve just come to make some more and discovered my  recipe from last time was too sloppy and I had to ‘backfill’ a fair bit of extra Fullers so you may end up doing the same – just have a good ol’ experiment!*

I also deployed a teaspoon and a cotton bud with one end clipped off, and mixed the ingredients in the intended receptacle to cut down on waste. Oh, and the widest aperture possible to try get some sexy bokeh but it didn’t quite work out as planned.

In goes the Fullers Earth powder and Fairy Liquid followed by the glycerin. Mix it all up. I did it with the cotton bud to get things going then when it had all started to bind I got stuck in with the teaspoon.

Boom, job done, you now have some Fullers Earth mixture

But wait, how do you know this will work? Well it’s lucky for you I have an inquisitive mind! I performed a very simple test involving a wet fly, some 12lb copolymer (so you’d have a chance of seeing it) and a paddling pool.

Here we see the ‘before’ shot. This is meant to be a bloody wet fly!

I then put a light application of my product along the length of tippet then put back into the children’s paddling pool test environment

It works! Straight to the bottom. So now I have some sinkant and when it dries out I can just liven it back up with some more glycerin or just mix up a new batch.