Triple Surgeon’s Knot
Seminar by Fish Alaska’s George Krumm
Triple surgeon’s knot is very effective for tying fluorocarbon or monofilament tippet material to a fluorocarbon or mono leader for flyfishing. If you can tie an overhand knot, you can tie the triple surgeon’s. Watch the video to see how easy it can be to connect your tippet material to your leader using a triple surgeon’s.
We use the triple surgeon’s in this capacity instead of some other venerable favorites such as the blood knot and the Uni-to-Uni knot. The reason we prefer it is that it seems equally strong, but is way easier to tie, and you can tie this knot with lines of significantly different diameters—something that’s very hard to do with a blood knot.
This knot is bulkier than the blood knot. But for the relatively small materials in which we tie it (2x- through 4x tippet material), it’s not an issue. That said, if we were going to tie a long, tapered leader using a half-dozen or more knots and stepping down from 25- or 30-pound-test all the way to 3x, we’d use the blood knot due it it’s smaller profile.
When using the triple surgeon’s, it’s important to make the untightened knot big enough, and with long enough tag ends, to properly and tightly seat the knot. Like all knots tied in mono or fluoro, be sure to lubricate the knot well before you tighten it.
Editor George Krumm says he sometimes still uses a blood knot, if the materials he’s joining are the same (i.e. mono to mono, or fluoro to fluoro), and if the diameters of the two materials are very close. However, if joining dissimilar materials (fluoro to mono), and/or the diameters of the materials are significantly different, he generally uses the triple surgeon’s.