A Tale of Two Lines
A rockfish had just consumed my live spot. As it swam off with its prize, I knew that it was a good-sized fish from its forceful and deliberate pace.
Having hooked it at the base of a bridge support, I was also prepared for the fish’s next move. As it bored away and cornered on the first nearby concrete support, it was right where I wanted it.
In previous episodes this season, live-lining small spot around the various structures on the Chesapeake, I had lost a heartbreaking number of large rockfish. Almost all were due to encounters with the concrete, rock and steel constructions that had attracted and held the fish in the first place.
With spot relatively scarce the last two seasons, I had set up all of my live-bait gear with 20-pound monofilament, a generally superior choice for bait fishing such as chumming or bottom fishing. This season, though, spot have been plentiful.
I rediscovered that mono can’t stand up to abrasive structures like the Bay Bridge. In most published angling studies on braid vs. mono, braid is less durable when it comes to fraying and general damage. Thus it stands to reason braid would be a poor choice for live-lining around hard structure.
Those results are true on lines of equal test strength. But if you compare 20-pound mono with a braided line of equal diameter, you will be talking about a braid of approximately 50-pound test. As Napoleon was once fond of saying, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
That was why I was not worried by the stress placed on my gear when that hefty rockfish began threading its way through the concrete and rebar jungle gym where I’d hooked it. With my drag set at a moderate level, I gave up a lot of line as I backed off my skiff for a better angle. Then I torqued the drag down firmly, and the game was on.
I could feel the 50-pound braid grating against the intervening bridge supports, but I felt certain the additional coatings on my Power Pro line would hold up. As I levered the fish first around one obstacle then another, my line steadily built back up on the spool and the fish came ever closer. At last the 32-incher came to the net.
This is one case where braid was clearly superior to mono. But as every angler knows, there is no single solution for everything. Braid has great advantages — but not in all situations. Because braided line is opaque or solid colored and not the least translucent, it is more visible than mono or fluoro. So it is always a good idea to use generous fluoro or mono leaders with braid.
Because of its virtual lack of stretch and its comparatively small diameter, braid is also almost always the superior line for trolling. That translates into getting deeper with less weight because of minimal water resistance and because with no stretch you can get solid hookups trolling very long lines.
That elasticity of mono (up to 50 percent), however, can sometimes be an advantage. When rigging my light perch rods for casting spinner baits in the shallows, I always use monofilament not only for its stretch but also its translucence.
Mono is much more forgiving in perch battles as it stretches and cushions the stress on their fragile mouth structure. Perch were numerous in these same shallow waters, and the schools were far more tolerant to my continued casting with the less obvious translucent lines.