Quote Originally Posted by NAGG View Post
I've always been perplexed by this

With mono having typically 30% stretch it has to be an impediment in fishing for demersal species

That stretch will enable a fish (in theory) to gain 1/3rd of the distance of the amount of line in the water ...... potentially making it to cover .

The other one is setting the hook .......... if the line has 1/3rd stretch , that makes it difficult to set the hook .

Both of these are exacerbated the deeper the water & the more line in the water.

To my way of thinking it's counter intuitive.

Thoughts ??

Chris
Generally Lipper, Grassies and Snapper using float line methods the fish are taken many metres off the bottom, regularly mid water or even only a couple of meters from the top. With braid many fish are not hooked due to the tension coming on too quickly and the fish dropping the bait, with mono by the time the fish realizes that all is not right you are setting the hook as we are feeding line out in free spool mode, on Fraser we used to call it the Zooms when the fish took the bait and ran. In most cases all of the larger fish of all three species have been caught on gravelly bottom or off the edge of the reef, Lippers and big Grassies generally patrol the sand between reefs and bommies and rarely directly on the reef, local divers here also say the same. Off Tempest generally late afternoon or early evening in 80 or 100 metres of water if we didn't catch a snapper by the time we hit 50 metres we would reel in and drop again. After many missed hookups we went back to mono and had far more success. I use braid in 30 m and deeper but in saying that I've been known to use leader up to 8m long with better success, minimum I would go with is 3 m.