4-Salt

Could be, ultimately you never know. But I think just as plausible an explanation is that dragging the bottom is lowering your presentation to where the fish are. Tinking the bottom with a 10 ft leader in a river going 200,000 cfs; you're probably going right over them. That's what I thought anyway; I agree that staying in contact with the bottom was the way to go.

In the really fast king water, I actually switched from heavy mono to 35lb Power Pro which is much thinner (diameter of 8lb mono). This is the only place I drift fish Power Pro owing to the difficulties in getting the stuff out of snags and ruining drifts if you do leave strands of it in the water (most everyone on the Fraser fished this way). Using Power Pro, the line got down to the bottom faster and stayed there longer through the drift. Given that the leader is 10 ft, I think you still get a lot of swing, and even if you're really draggin and you're leader is straight downstream from your weight, its still probably wagging left and right in the current. Come to think about it, the more you drag, the wider you're leader is likely to wag back and forth. And wagging back and forth may facilitate hookups in (inside) the mouth as oppose to on the side. Ultimately, I think a small presentation (such as yarn only, or a small corky and yarn, 1/0 hooks instead of 4/0s) wagging in front of the fish will get helped into the mouth of the fish by its own breathing (remember the suck and gape thing). All you have to do is cast it out, and run it down along the line of fish. And on the Fraser Scale Bar, you KNEW where the fish were.

ReiterRat probably agrees with you, but when we checked it out last season, he, being a non-Canadian (I consider myself an honorary Canadian wink ), decided he could get'em using traditional American stuff. He began the day using a shorter leader and a larger spin-n-glo for visibility. Nada. Switched over, and he's into the fish. Ultimately, if you're not lining them, why do you need that 10 ft leader?

If we were forced to use normal gear, maybe we would get biters, they definitely hit in the Vedder and Stilly. But as a slug of 2-300 sockeye move through a drift, you'd probably only see several hooked as opposed to dozens using the long leaders.