How to attach sighters to your line
In this video, I’ll show you how to attach sighters to your line and explain why they are so important when fishing with a Honryu or Keiryu rod.
Sighters help you not only detect strikes, but also keep track of where your line is during the drift.
Unlike tenkara rods, Honryu and Keiryu rods are quite long. For example, a 7-meter Honryu rod is over 21 feet long, and when you add a line of similar length attached to the rod tip, your drift can easily be 30 feet away from you or more. That means your line is often far enough away that it can be difficult to see and control without a visual reference.
About half of the strikes can be felt directly through the line, because the line often stays fairly tight during the drift. The other half are detected visually by watching the line or the sighters. If the line stops, hesitates, or shows any unnatural movement in the drift, that’s the moment to set the hook.
I like to keep the sighter about 1 to 2 feet above the water’s surface. That way, I can make micro-adjustments to the drift depth — 6 inches deeper, 6 inches shallower, 12 inches deeper, 12 inches shallower, and so on.
I also like to use two or three different colors for my sighters. For example, I might arrange them red, green, and white from top to bottom.
From my experience, when I use red as the bottom sighter, fish sometimes come up and strike at it. It seems that fish may be especially attracted to red, so I usually prefer to use green or white for the bottom sighter instead.
