Let’s talk about………….all things braid

Sometimes when I wake up early I get to thinking about the amount of money we can spend on fishing rods and reels and lures, and I think about how much pleasure these things can give us when we head out there and do our thing. We can get such good fishing tackle for far less money these days, and at the end of the day we are trying to hook and stay connected to a few fish. An expensive car or an Epic Berlingo is still going to get you from A to B regardless of what the driving experience is like - I’d suggest that it’s pretty epic in my Epic Berlingo, and especially if you like throwing a chest freezer on wheels around Cornish country lanes - and whatever you spend or don’t spend on a rod and reel for your fishing will most likely still catch you a bunch of fish if you know enough about the where and when………………

But however good you are at fishing and however much you might choose to spend on a fishing rod and reel, still the principal connection between you and a hooked fish is your mainline. You can take out a second mortgage on a rod and reel combination without much trouble, but all the money in the world still doesn’t buy you a different type of connection to a potential fish of your dreams than a length of line. All that time and effort and energy we invest in trying to catch fish and at the end of the day we are trusting our sanity to a thin bit of fishing line. I don’t know about you, but when I sit and think about how much I put into my fishing, holy frigging cow is there a lot riding on my mainline - which these days happens to be braid.

I’m going to presume that if you are reading this post and you’re into something like lure fishing for bass then you fish with a braid mainline. A couple of years ago I realised that I hadn’t fished with a monofilament mainline for ages, so I loaded up a spinning reel with some 10lb mono to go and see what it felt like casting some of the lures I am so used to fishing with. About five casts later and I was reminded just how nice it is to fish with modern braids which come off the reel so well and go through the guides so quietly and effortlessly compared to mono. Off came the mono because it felt so horrible!

Braid has been around for a long time now and I still have a vivid memory of a heated discussion I had in a local tackle shop when it was suggested to me that wreck and reef fishing for pollack from the boat didn’t work with braid mainlines because it “bounced fish off the hook” too much. I politely suggested that this was a load of crap but was shot down for being some sort of TV fishing expert who didn’t have a clue. I am not and never want to be an expert, but I would hazard a pretty good guess that those same anglers have been fishing with braid in certain situations without any hassle for a fair while now.

Modern braids just work, and especially if you are casting lures on modern spinning reels with decent line-lays that are designed to work with modern braids. For sure you get to know which reels work with specific line levels, but if you get to know all this and allow for this then I can’t see how the dreaded wind knots can really be an issue these days. You might need to keep a bit of an eye on things if you are say working a lighter surface lure in a bit of chop or wind, and some spinning reels really do need a lower line-lay than others - Penn Spinfisher VI 2500 for example (lovely reel, but you can’t fill it right up with braid if you are casting lures) - but of course the tackle companies aren’t about to tell you this and it’s up to us the anglers to find out and try to help other anglers become aware of any idiosyncrasies and how to work with them for hassle-free fishing.

I have talked about the 8-strand braids which really opened up my eyes on here many times before, so there’s no need to repeat myself - but damn they were not cheap. Bearing in mind that I came to using braid basically all the time relatively late in my fishing life and I haven’t been lure fishing for bass since before I was actually born, I am going to credit Daiwa for introducing the first permutation of J-Braid a fair few years ago and essentially changing the market for high quality modern braids and what we needed to pay. I do remember a lot of stuff being talked about that original Daiwa J-Braid and I know nothing about any of the newer versions because I haven’t fished with J-Braid since it first hit the market, but back then I knew exactly what Daiwa braid that original J-Braid actually was. I’d been fishing with it for a couple of years and it just worked. It required good, modern knots, and the original quoted diameters and breaking strains on the braid that became the first J-Braid were generous at best, but I still believe that most of the hassle that a few anglers had with the stuff was because they weren’t using decent knots and because we are predominantly blokes we refuse to admit when we might be wrong.

I had been fishing completely fuss-free with the Daiwa braid that was subsequently launched as J-Braid, but when I first started fishing with it, it was way above that almost magical £20 mark for a spool around 150m or so. Somewhere within the Daiwa company they decided to take this braid, rename it as J-Braid, rejiggle the quoted diameters and breaking strains, and launch it with great fanfare for under the £20 price point here in the UK. Finally we could get a really serious modern 8-strand braid for a more “budget” price, and we haven’t looked back since.

Are there any truly bad braids out there these days? I do feel sorry for the anglers who ask what braid to go for on something like Facebook because they get about fifty different braids thrown at them as being the best thing you can buy. I don’t remotely blame anybody for suggesting the braid or braids they happen to fish with and trust by the way - I obviously do the same thing on here - rather what I mean is that it can be bloody confusing trying to choose a spool of braid to buy for your fishing when there are so many good ones out there these days. It’s a good thing that this is the case, but at the same time it’s also rather confusing.

You might have guessed that for all my interest in fishing tackle, I am not a technical sort of bloke. What braid I happen to like and fish with is based purely on fishing time and trust, and what I get on with really well might for some reason not do it for you. I always use some sort of leader on the end of my braid and I always use the FG knot to connect my braid to my leader, so the braids I use are also factoring in that element I guess. I also do tend to like a brighter colour braid because in the daytime it’s generally easier for me to see, and whilst I accept completely that some anglers don’t like bright braids for various reasons, I haven’t yet found any reason via my own fishing to think that a bright mainline to a clear leader is putting our fish off. I think about all that amazing sight fishing with fly gear in the ultra-clear waters of the various tropical flats, and for the most part the actual fly lines and backing are really bright (which is really good for my photography I might add). As with our lure fishing these anglers are finishing off with clear leaders, and I haven’t yet seen anything to suggest that a really wary fish like a bonefish or permit is remotely spooked by a bright coloured fly line on or under the water. Bass ain’t bonefish!

Use whatever braid or colour of braid you trust. I get to play with a lot of different braids and I give some of them a lot of real fishing time. If I find something that for some reason floats my boat more than my current most trusted mainline I will move over to it. I can only recall actively disliking very few braids over the years, and any technical stuff aside which doesn’t mean much to me when I am actually out fishing, I don’t quite know why some braids do it for me a bit more than others. They just do and I tend to know what I like. A few years ago some of us went on a bass fishing trip to Morocco and the lad out there who helped us out was fishing with that YGK Upgrade PE braid I think it was. It looked and felt lovely, and if it worked for him in Morocco, it had to be worth a punt.

When I got home I tracked some down and bought it, but for various reasons I just could not get on with it at all. I tried and tried and I berated myself for being useless, but after about a million times of it wrapping around my rod tip in the cast I finally gave in and took it off my reel. And this is the point - some of you here probably use this exact braid and think it’s the best stuff out there which means that you can’t be wrong if the stuff works for you and your fishing.

I swore to myself that after fishing with the newer sub-£20 braids like Daiwa J-Braid, Sufix Performance Pro 8, Sufix 832, Sufix X8, and SpiderWire Stealth Smooth 8 braids, there was no point in spending any more than £20 for a spool of braid around the 150m capacity, not when those specific braids fish so incredibly well. And then along comes the Sufix 131 braid and out the window goes all those mature promises to myself! I am not remotely catching more bass because I am so often fishing with a rather expensive braid these days, but as I said earlier it’s all down to fishing time and trust in what you use.

The fact that I can’t get enough of this stuff AND that I have such a thing for Sufix lines in general doesn’t remotely mean that you should feel the same way as me, but with that connection between us and any fish we hook being nothing more than a rather thin bit of mainline, I’m going to keep on fishing with the braid or braids I like and trust the most. I have a strong feeling that Sufix 131 lasts and lasts almost like no other braid I have used, but then so does the much cheaper Sufix 832 which is just about the strongest feeling braid I have ever come across (it lasts almost too long is what I have heard from Sufix HQ). Nothing remotely scientific I might add, and any braid can snap when run across a sharp rock by a fish, but I know what I can feel, and when I need to pull for a break or a hook bending out, damn that Sufix 832 takes it. But then so does this Sufix 131, and it just feels to me like it comes off the reel, goes through the guides, and fishes in wind and current like no other braid I have fished with so far. You are most likely finding these exact same experiences with a totally different braid I might add.

Most of the 8plus-strand braids we might use these days are almost ridiculously thin, indeed surely that’s a lot of the point to fishing with them. If it’s any help at all I tend to go for a braid which in Europe is quoted at around 20lbs, and this in turn is most likely to be somewhere between 0.15mm-0.18mm and a PE#1. Our bass are awesome but on a straight pull we obviously don’t need a braid this strong. I choose to take into account the sort of ground I often fish, plus the fact that a braid around PE#1 is pretty bloody thin already and my lures seem to go out there just fine so do I really need to go much thinner?

I have talked before about messing around with some higher diameter braids to see if it makes any difference to the very rare time that a fish runs my braid over sharp rocks, so I have loaded a reel up with a spool of Sufix 131 in the 30lb/0.235mm/PE#2 size. Give me more time with it in wind and/or current especially, but I can’t see or feel any difference in how my lures are getting out there when compared to the PE#1 version. Again, I don’t need a braid quoted at 30lb for bass fishing, but it’s the diameter and how it behaves which I am more interested in. So far so good, but then this Sufix 131 stuff has ended up being my go-to braid these days. I would imagine that your go-to braid is not the same as mine, but I do hope that this rather long blog post has shown that it really doesn’t matter. All that does matter is trusting that connection between you and what could be the fish of a lifetime. You all have a good Easter weekend, please stay safe and well, see you next week…………..

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