Quote:
Originally Posted by michauxii
Thanks MathGeek!
That's the info I was after..
Good testing too!
It's a crying shame that MANY fishermen don't pay a whole lot of attention to their knots.
And when I have a little extra time on my hands,and can't get to the the water, you durn well betcha I'm testing various knots.. looking for just the right one when that 200# tarpon,50# redfish, 50#snook, or 13# speck comes along.
Oh well, I can dream big anyhow  |
Few LA waters are clear enough for line visibility to be a big issue, especially when soaking crabs on the bottom for bull reds, so one can get strength by increasing the line diameter. We use 80 lb mono and have stopped paying for fluorocarbon. We still tie careful knots, inspect leaders often, and retie knots frequently.
But the study in the paper was motivated by our experiences trolling for trout with spoons in Colorado's gin clear mountain reservoirs. We needed to keep the line diameter down both for invisibility and proper lure action. We'd been using Seguar Grand Max Fluorocarbon for a couple years and figured since it was expensive and name brand, it must be pretty good. It did catch a lot of fish, but we lost a few big trout unexpectedly, so we began to look at the knot strength.
After the experiment, we switched to Ande, which is really great stuff. With a little care tying a uni knot, the knotted strength retains the rated strength of the leader material. We considered re-doing these kind of force experiments after fishing for a day to see how much strength is lost through a day of use, but we instead just kept replacing the leader material and retying after a few hours of use.
A scale is a great tool to learn to tie good knots. Poor knots reduce line strength more than any other factor, at least until it gets nicked. And nicks are easy to spot.