Braid

[Curious]

Are any of you guys using braided line on conventional reels for offshore trolling and sharking? If so, what are the pros and cons. Can you spool up a smaller reel with stronger braid and still have good results or is the reel not going to handle the pressure? Thanks.

[Cape Fisherman]

Due its significantly smaller diameter to strength ratio relative to mono, braid allows you to pack more line on a reel. To determine whether I use braid, or traditional dacron for backing my reels, I work backwards by first looking at my drag settings.

I set my 80s to 22#s at strike, which corresponds to roughly 30#s at full. I like to keep my line strength three to four times greater than my drag setting, so for my 80s I run 80# or 100# mono top shots. A combination of 200 yds 80 or 100# topshot with 80# dacron gives me plenty of capacity on my 80s so I do not use braid.

Similarly, for my 30 wides I topshot with 60# mono and back them with 80# dacron.

Now, for a pair of Penn 15KGs I chose to back them with 80# solid spectra, transitioned to 50 yds of 80# hollow core which is then spliced into a 75 yd 80# mono topshot. This gives me a lot of line capacity and enables me to set my reels at 18#s drag at strike with 23#s at full.

So, the bottom line is yes, braid works very well for smaller reels. What you need to consider is drag settings and work from there. Keep in mind drag pressures increases as the spool diameter decreases. So if you set your reel to 20#s at strike and a fish peels off three quarters of your line, without you changing the drag position the pressure goes up a noticeable amount.