MHC report 12/8

[Sea Draggin]

Honestly I can only speculate. There were several break offs of the mainline today. Sometimes I think that at the time of the bite there may be more than one fish coming in on the bait and on the first run the line can rub up against the others? Who knows. Line is new and cut back daily, so it should be good right?

If I knew exactly why/how it happened I would feel better,but I figure when dealing with fish like this it is bound to happen time and again.

In April catching 150-200lb fish, I had a collision break off using 80lb jerry brown. I guarantee it wasn't bad line. It just happens.

[frankypettolina]

My thought process is that a bad batch of line would reveal itself when checking drags or immediately on a bite, not an hour into it, but who knows.

Line is defintely cheap compared to what we get per fish. In my opinion so are leaders and crimps. We cut back every day, and freshen connections daily. Better safe than sorry.

[tolbard]

Good luck this year. Thanks for the report.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Franky,

Sorry about the popped off fish, but glad to hear that they are finally showing up. I agree with you on the line thing. It should fail while checking drags and it should happen a lot if the line is no good, not just once in a while.

Now most of you know that I do some pretty crazy stuff, and I admit it, but here's a thought. I suspect that you're right as far as one of a school of fish getting at the line above the leader when they all go after a bait, most likely getting it in his teeth. The pressure of that happening just as a fish is hooked and there's a lot of pressure on the line and leader at that point would probably result is considerable damage where the bite happened.

At least, that's what we wound up thinking back when we market fished the bigeyes and big bluefins. So we did something that sounds nuts, but either those breakoffs just above the leader went away on their own, or what we did worked. One thing was for sure - the breaks stopped, so we always did the following.

It was sort of the reverse of one of the tuna bombs that we used to always use when chumming and chunking giants, except that the nylon chaffing gear (mighty tough stuff) was placed above the swivel at the top of the leader. That way, if one of those "line bites" happened, it happened on the chaffing gear, not the line itself. And just like the chafe gear on a tuna bomb, the fish couldn't hurt the line. Seemed to work like a champ and once we started doing it, the pop offs simply stopped, so as noted, we always rigged that way.

In our case, we only chaffed about three feet of line directly above the leader swivel. Didn't seem to have any negative effects as far as getting bites were concerned and as you know, if we had noticed anything like that we'd have immediately stopped the chaffing. That's the way it was money fishing and it's probably the same today...if it don't work, don't do it!

Anyhoo, this might appear nuts to some, but it sure seemed to work for us and I'm just passing it along here.

Now, I hope those fish stay and you and the other guys catch 'em up, however you rig for them!