Weighty Matters

Lead...it used to be the fisherman's weighting material of choice. And why wouldn't it be? It's cheap, dense, easily moldable. Toxic, yes, but who worried about that as long as you weren't going to eat the stuff?

It still is far and away the fisherman's weight of choice, but that's slowly changing as anglers' awareness of lead's dangers grows. Lead can contaminate waters, and small lead shot can poison birds and other creatures that ingest them. Handling lead isn'tgood for the fishermen themselves, and I hate to think of all the lead
shot I handled over the years. If my prose sometimes seems a little
addled,that may be the cause. The waste from processing lead multiplies
considerably the environmental threat from this familiar anglers' tool.

Substitutes like tin and tungsten are appearing on the market, but for me at least,
these haven't been wholly satisfactory replacements. I did like the tin
split shot I bought a few years ago; it's lightness relative to lead
provided more natural drifts duringnymphing , though it wasn't heavy
enough to sink streamers where I wanted them. In spite of that, I would
have kept using them, but I haven't seen them in stores for some time
now. Tungsten is even denser than lead and is increasingly used in bead
or cone heads for nymphs and streamers, but it's expensive, and in
split shot form it doesn't mold easily. You can buy tungsten split shot,
but they don't pinch off easily like the old lead or tin shots did. For
the last couple of years, I've been using a tungsten paste which is
quite dense, but doesn't stay on the line very long. It does mold
easily around the leader--provided the temperature is at least 50F.
That mostly rules out use duringsteelhead season.

Despite the inconvenience, I'll keep trying to use non-toxic weights until I find
an acceptable one. And here I run into a problem--I can't seem to find
any, at least on store shelves. This confuses me, especially in shops
catering to fly fishers, because most of these preach catch-and-release
and low-impact angling like they're commandments from the lips of God
himself, yet stock only lead weights. Is a little consistency too much
to ask?

I often see non-toxic weights in catalogues, but, I
rarely find anything else I want to order (and I prefer to buy from
local stores anyway), and my congenital cheapness halts me from placing
an order whose shipping charge would exceed the cost of the
merchandise. This may be a rare case where thrift and logic are not
allies of responsibility.

So can anyone recommend a good non-toxic split shot?