LAND YOUR FISH OF A LIFETIME
Your standard braid and leader should cope with your bass fishing, but if not, why not? Here’s how to stay connected...
Are your braid and leader up to it?
Ihave a feeling that if I examined the lure fishing tackle of 100 bass anglers, the most common breaking strain for both their braid mainline and fluoro or monofilament leader would be either 20lb or at least close to this. When we go lure fishing for bass from the shore, we are unlikely to connect with a bass that weighs more than 10lb. Even if we are lucky enough to hook a magical double-figure fish, it isn’t going to go over 20lb – we can but dream, though.
It is perfectly possible to land fish that weigh far more than the breaking strain of your line but, of course, this doesn’t take into account where you are fishing.
I have seen 200lb-plus sharks landed from beaches in Namibia on 0.50mm/30lb mono
on multiple occasions, and I see some coarse anglers using incredibly light mainlines and hooklengths to land fish much bigger than the actual breaking strains of their lines.
I have watched fly-fishermen on clean sand flats landing loads of what I think are just about the most aggressive and hard-fighting fish on the planet – the giant trevally (GT).
SHARP FINGERS OF ROCK
Put the same fly-angler and the same fish on a reef where the GT can make a charge for snaggy cover, and it’s a completely different story – the fish will win most of the time.
Bass are not GTs, of course, but a 5lb bass hooked on a clean beach is a different proposition to a 5lb bass hooked over the roughest ground imaginable where sharp fingers of rock are itching to reach out and slice through your thin and ultra-smooth eight-strand braid.
It’s not the fish’s fault, and I wouldn’t class bass as dirty fighters, but the fact is that we lure fish for bass over all kinds of ground. I don’t believe that your average 20lb mainline and 20lb leader are up to all of it.
While I’ll default to that 20lb set-up as much as I can because it works just fine most of the time, there are a few bass which I have hooked and lost over the last few years that still haunt me. Sometimes the blame rests at my door, although I don’t like having to admit it. There have been a few occasions when I don’t think there was a single thing that I could have done differently to prevent those fish breaking me off and getting away.
It amazes me how thin and supple these modern braided mainlines are and how easy they are to fish with. A good-quality 20lb or so eight-strand braid is considerably thinner and I think more fragile than a similar strength monofilament. We want the much thinner line because it improves our lure fishing, but it’s a compromise because thicker line would withstand abrasions better than thin line.
EXTRA EFFORT
You can consider your options by sitting down with a cup of coffee and going through the different bass marks you fish. Think about the ground and the fish you have caught or seen caught. Think about whether these fish were hooked at range and so on. Consider the conditions that work best for these locations, and after all that thinking (phew!) you are ready to make the extra effort to tailor your set-up more precisely to where you are fishing.
For instance, the most typical bass mark is a shallow, gnarly reef that doesn’t hold much water even at high tide. If there is one thing that bass like, it’s to feed very close to the shoreline at times, and especially on these reefs. By no means am I saying that I don’t want the option to put my lures out as far as possible, but we need to be realistic and work out what is more important.
Does increasing the strength and therefore diameter of your mainline make much difference to how you can fish your lures on a mark like this? Ten years ago, I’d have said yes, but not now because modern eight-strand braids are so amazingly thin and supple.
I don’t believe that they are particularly fragile either. Now, it’s a simple argument to me that a tight mainline of, say, 0.15mm diameter to a scrapping fish isn’t going to withstand rubbing against a sharp rock anywhere near as well as a 0.50mm mono mainline, and so on.
Fishing is often a compromise between what in an ideal world might be perfect, but in the real world isn’t the best option. Would I want to go lure fishing for bass with a 0.50mm/30lb monofilament mainline though? Not a chance, but around those shallow reefs I often deliberately work certain gullies and holes and sections of reef.
Casting distance and cutting through wind and current is not generally a big factor on shallow reefs, as it might be on a clean surf beach when you’ve got a Force 5 coming at you and you’re casting metals hard to put them in behind the main breakers.
STAY CONNECTED
Aside from the obvious of needing to know as much as possible about why and when the bass might be there, what could be another primary consideration on this gnarly, shallow reef? How about doing our utmost to stay attached to any bass we hook?
I know I want to and, believe me, I am talking from experience here. A few specific bass that I didn’t stay connected to still haunt my dreams and give me an incentive to stay connected the next time I might hook a donkey in the rough stuff.
For a few years now, my go-to braid for my ‘everyday’ bass fishing has been the Sufix Performance Pro 8 in 0.15mm/21lb. When this braid is secured to a 15lb or 20lb fluoro leader via an FG knot, I have a strong connection to any fish I might hook.
Sufix has discontinued this braid, so more recently I have been using its new X8 in the 17lb/0.148mm/PE 0.8 and 23lb/0.165mm/ PE1.0 versions. You might fish with different eight-strand braids, but most of them are so good that they are essentially flawless.
These braids are extremely thin and a complete joy to fish with lures. Should you really be using such a thin braid when targeting bass on this shallow, gnarly reef? I assume that you have either more than one spinning reel or, at least, a spare spool – and, of course, your local bass fishing may not require any kind of ‘upping it’ approach at all.
As for me, well I can’t prove whether increasing the diameter of my mainline and leader makes the difference, but it gives me increased confidence of landing a fish.
If one big fish in the future doesn’t manage to break me off when my braid or leader pings against a sharp rock, well, that’s a result. I want the best possible chance of landing that fish of a lifetime.
The more I fish with a really tough and robust braid and increase the diameter to, say, 0.18mm/26lb or 0.20mm/30lb, the more I believe that the extra thickness may make the difference. Put a 30lb fluoro leader on the end of this line via the FG knot and I reckon I can take on the roughest ground out there.
Most of the time it doesn’t worry me if bass see the thicker leader, but there are times when I think it does, and I will deal with this soon. ■