Crack-Offs? ? Cobblers!

All very true... but .... while you are <u>learning</u> to castnice and smoothly I would say it is not a bad idea to use stronger than necessary braid and potentially save a few £. It can really spoil your day to see a decent lure heading for the horizon and suddenly realise that it is no longer attached!

Andy,

It would spoil one's day an awful lot more if said lure then hits a fellow angler on the far bank!

Especially as most anglers don't take out 3rd Party Insurance.

Agreed and that is one more reason to use higher bs braid when learning the trade. Having said that Peter I have less reason to worry as on most if the lakes I fish it would take more than a cracked off lure to get anywhere near the opposite bank!

One point to remember when comparing American spooled lines, both mono and braid, is that they are rated strength wise in lbs "test". This means that the lines have been tested to a pull of the number of pounds they are rated.

I am not surprised that the 20lbs test braid Jeff mentions broke at a 40lbs straight pull.

Jeff, for me it's not about crack-offs, I use 65lb Power Pro for lures and deadbaiting. why? Because of snags, I used to use 15lb mono until one day I got snagged andleft a whole mackeral and two trebles in the water.

I felt sick because of what might happen if a pike got fouled on one of the hooks and died. I sought advice from a good friend and he advised me to use 65lb braid. Since then I haven't looked back, I've snagged many times, but on a straight pull the hooks have straightened and I've always got the lot back, that goes for lures too.

Does fishing a heavier braid cause you any problems? It doesn't for me and I still play a pike using the clutch/drag, I can't see the problem in using a heavy braid. It's safer and elimantes tackle losses.

Two points,

When practising, use a lure of reasonable weight and remove all hooks. If you get an overrun you can let it sink to the bottom whilst you sort out the line and the lure will still come off the bottom OK. I still use a very heavy Rapala spoon thing even now if I want a long cast to sort out line that builds up one side of the reel, but that's caused through winding in and level-winds not working as they should.

Most of my practising in the very late 60s and early 70s was with a rubber plug you always got with Abu reels. Useful if one hit you as it just bounced off hard surfaces.

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Do most of your practising in a field and ensure there's no-one around. That's what I did until I gained in confidence. Controlling overruns was the most difficult of all especially with nylon, which wasn't as soft then as it is now, in my opinion.

Eventually I got casting quite well and with a beachcaster and a Mitchell I could hit well over 100 yards, nothing like the pro-casters even then who were hitting 200 yards.

For what it's worth, I'm with Woody every step of the way. His findings mirror my own, sound advice!!

the prob i have with heavy braids is if you did pull for a break and the line cut off on a snag, bar or whatever (ok, unlikely but it does happen) its one hell of a snag which will take for ever to break down, and cause more lines to get tangled.

<blockquote class=quoteheader>Frothey wrote (see)</blockquote><blockquote class=quote>the prob i have with heavy braids is if you did pull for a break and the line cut off on a snag, bar or whatever (ok, unlikely but it does happen) its one hell of a snag which will take for ever to break down, and cause more lines to get tangled.</blockquote>
Yeah but if you're snagged with a lighter braid you're more more likely to break it anyway. I really can't see the problem with fishing a heavier braid?

so why not use 100lb braid?

what if a fish takes you thru a snag, and the line tangles? its not going to break the branch, so it'll snap somewhere inbetween you and the snag.....

I'll stick with my 65lb Frothey, Im happy with that for all the reasons I've mentioned.

Yep, that article is cobblers.

I was in at the beginning of the large lure revolution in the UK in the 1990s along with a fair few others around the country. Some informal groups fishing in isolation all reached the same conclusions. The group I was associated with started out using the 15lb mono we had always used for pike fishing. It snapped eventually (pretty soon actually) through repeated casting - not through poor casting technique. We gradually stepped up to 25lb mono or more. At which point we stopped cracking lures off unless we got a birdsnest.

Anyone who says they never gets birdsnests when using a multiplier for lure fishing is either a liar or hasn't got their reel set to cast to the maximum.

Similarly our leaders went from 30lb to 90lb and more for the very same reason. The wire would snap through the rigours of repeatedly casting lures weighing 3oz and upwards. When using jerkbaits the act of jerking the lure adds to the fatigue factor.

Then braid became available. We spooled up with the same breaking strain as our heavy mono. We started cracking off again. So we upped the breaking strain until we stopped cracking off. The point at which that was reached was around 80lb. When first launched Power Pro was not available in 80lb, so we used 100lb. I still use 100lb for surface lure fishing as it stays afloat better than thinner braids.

When you snag up with 80lb braid either the snag moves, the hooks bend, or the leader or line breaks. If the line breaks it goes at the knot. Mostly the line doesn't break.

That's how it is. That's why 80lb braid and leaders to match ARE required to fish heavy lures.

Besides, there is no point fishing finer as it won't catch you any more fish, but it will lose you ££££s worth of lures - and far worse, potentially leave lures attached to pike.

I have to say, I don't see the problem with heavier braid. Clearly the pike don't care how heavy your line or trace is and the days of 'giving the fish a fighting chance' are long gone so what's the point in using anything lighter??

i landed a fish at a well known commercial complex that was towing 50 or 60 yards of heavy braid - it doesn't always go at the knot, but as dave said, if using a leader its fine. braids been ditched on some of the big snaggy waters infavour of mono as braid is great, until damaged - it then snaps quite easily. which is why the weave of something like Quiksilver is different to most mainline braids (correct me if I'm wrong DK!). people fishing wrecks sometimes have the same prob.....

dont get me wrong, i use powerpro quite a lot when fishing at range, but i dont actually like it in bad snaggy areas.

but you use what you are happy with, if you haven't had a problem you probably never will. maybe.....

Wished my braid had been heavier when i cracked of my Loz Harrop darter,gutted

I have to agree with Dave, partly because he's been doing this a lot longer than I have and was one of the pioneers of modern "heavy" lure fishing, partly because fishing as heavy as you can get away with invariably means less lost lures in casting, less chance of leaving a lure (or bait...) tethered to a snag and less chance of breaking off on a fish.

Pike don't seem to care how heavy your trace is. I generally use 90lbs traces for average-sized to large lures, because I know the wire and components will stand up to repeated casting a lot longer than their lighter counterparts.

I find heavy braid preferable for bait fishing on snaggy waters because mono droops and sinks, whereas braid floats. It makes a lot of difference having your line off the bottom - where snags usually are - and using heavy braid means I can straighten the hooks on a snag without leaving a baited rig on them.

Dave's bang on, but don't expect many on here to agree...and I certainly can't be ar5ed going over old ground....

I'm happy with my poor casting technique...

I will add this.

When barbel fishing I happily, and safely cast 7oz leads across the Trent without cracking off using 30lb Power Pro yet I wouldn't dream of using the same braid for any pike lure fishing, and certainly not for fishing 6oz lures.

The reason is that when barbel fishing I am using long, comparatively soft rods and casting maybe four times an hour - often a lot less than that. In one hour of lure fishing I might cast, I dunno for sure, but upwards of twenty times.

It is an often overlooked property of braid that while it may be strong on a steady pull it can break quite easily on a sharp tug. I use this to good effect when my feeders snag up! Braid is not good at coping with shocks. I guess because it lacks stretch.

Lures which can be fished on a straight retrieve can therefore be fished using a lighter braid than jerkbaits - partly down to the way they are fished and partly because they will often be fished using a longer more flexible rod.

no Dave, you just have a crap casting technique, just wait and see /forum/smilies/smile_smiley.gif

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