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Posted 08:01, 19 March 2010
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- Tim Griffin asked the question in a comment on a recent post - "what difference could you notice with the 8 strand over the 4 strand braid ?" And it got me thinking...........I am not a technical wizard on all things braid, not in the least bit in fact, but I know what I like, and I very much like using 8 strand braid for a lot of my lure fishing. But not for all of it.
- Above is a close up of this brand new Daiwa Tournament 8 Braid that I picked up in France (don't worry, you can get in green as well) - two years ago and this sort of line would have freaked the hell out of me, because firstly you need to get your head around how thin a true 8 strand braid is when you compare it to a more "regular" (but very good) 4 strand braid. A lower diameter mainline makes sense to me when you are casting and working all kinds of lures, and especially in cross winds and fast currents. Much as I can't speak highly enough of the awesome Varivas Avani Sea Bass Max Power PE in 20lb that I have been using and abusing for a while now (and I love it to bits and will continue to use it because it's just amazing stuff and I trust in it completely), in a perfect world I would love to be able to get hold of it in 30lb and then really take advantage of extra strength and a bit more "ruggedness", but still having an incredibly low diameter. But you can't get that particular Varivas 8 strand in 30lb - the new Daiwa stuff comes in a huge range of breaking strains though, and in due course I will get my hands on some of the 30lb stuff and see if it does for me what I think it will. I need to use and abuse the new Daiwa stuff long term before I am able to trust it like I trust the Varivas stuff. But both brands' 15lb and 20lb must be just about perfect for "finesse" bass fishing - the new me perhaps ??!!
- Do we need 30lb mainline for bass fishing ? Well the fish aren't going to break it, that's for sure. But when fishing over what might be termed "heavy ground", I can't help but want a little "extra" to help me wrench lures out of snags and also to provide that little bit more abrasion resistance. I might be wrong, but I believe that 4 strand braid has the edge over the 8 strand when it comes to abrasion resistance - and there are times when I am still going to choose to fish with the really good 4 strand braids because they offer me a bit more of a buffer. But let's face it here and admit that braids just aren't as good as mono for overall abrasion resistance. But I do have a very specialist braid here to test out soon that might just be worth looking at for something like fishing soft plastics for wrasse right into the middle of the rough stuff..........
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- 8 strand just feels like silk to me, whereas 4 strand feels a tiny bit "coarse" (above) - not that this matters one bit I grant you, but I am utterly convinced that these 8 strand braids cast better. This might be because they seem to lie on the spool very well (if that makes sense), but they just fly off when you really launch into a cast. I just don't get wind knots if I underfill my spools (check the line level in the top photo) and make sure to wind in under some kind of tension from time to time if I am imparting a lot of different movements to a lure. As I said, I am not into the technicalities of braid, but fishing with 8 strand braid just feels a whole lot "better" to me - kind of like I would imagine going from my Ford Focus Estate (radical) to something like a top of the pile Range Rover. Both will get you from A to B perfectly well, and both will do so with a degree of "feel", but the Range Rover is just going to be a "better" all round experience. The actual choice comes down to personal feelings and finances. That's my take on it anyway. Nothing right or wrong about using either of the different kinds of braid, just a feeling kind of thing.
- Check out the size of this thing !! My mate Cato emailed me this photo of an angler with this 80lb cod (yes you read that right, eighty pounds !!!!!) that was taken the other day from a boat somewhere in the north of Norway. Plus there was a ling caught that was somewhere between 80-90lbs - and Cato I believe is up there now, so here's hoping he is smashing some silly big fish. They have also been getting a lot of pollack in shallow water from 10-20lbs, and that is world class light tackle sport in anybody's book - presuming you are man enough to take the cold weather. Me ? I need to toughen up a bit !! Imagine actually seeing a cod like that one in the flesh - for all the problems we have with our cod stocks around here, it certainly makes me feel better about the world in general to know that there are still fish like that swimming around not actually very far from the good old Blighty.
- On Sunday I am heading up to the B.A.S.S. AGM - in their "wisdom" they asked me a while back to give a talk at their AGM, so I am going to attempt to enlighten/send them to sleep (delete whichever is most applicable) about bass fishing photography. I passionately believe that I am of most use to the future of fishing if I can make our sport look as visually impressive as possible, and I try to do all I can to make it appealing via my photography (I have put some new bass fishing photos into this gallery here). Without wanting to sound all kind of "professional", I would like to try and use this talk to help point the people who have to sit down and listen to me in the direction of starting to understand more about how to take better and more visually arousing photos of the fishing that we all love. I am really looking forward to seeing a bunch of people I already know up there, and also to meeting a load of new bass fishermen. Let's face it, we don't need much of an excuse to yap fishing do we now ??!!
- I got my first ever front cover the other day for the Danish magazine "Fisk & Fri" - which I am kind of presuming means "Fish and Fishing" (not bad eh ?).This shot was taken out in the Bolivian jungle last summer, and still it's about the most impressive freshwater fly fishing I think I have ever been lucky enough to have seen - these golden dorado rampaging around crystal clear jungle rivers is an experience that will never leave me, and hopefully I will get really lucky and head out there again one day. World class fly fishing, talk to Aardvark McLeod about it here. I shot the photo as a potential cover in the back of my mind, things just lined up right for me to be able to do it, but then you rely on the magazine people to pick up on it. I still get just about the biggest kick possible in my work when I see my photos on the covers of magazines, catalogues and books. "Fisk & Fri" made a really cool looking six page feature out of my Bolivia experience.
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Posted 09:17, 17 March 2010
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- If you virtually live in your breathable chest waders as I seem to have been doing for both my fishing and a lot of my work for years now, then wearing clothes like jeans or trackie bottoms underneath them for moving around a lot and fishing hard will result in you ending up a bit damp and uncomfortable. I actually know of some fishing tackle companies who have waders returned from customers who are convinced that they are leaking - when in fact it is because they are wearing the wrong stuff underneath the waders and end up sweating. And this can feel like there is a leak in the waders.......
- The trick to being comfortable underneath breathable waders is to wear the right clothes - what you wear next to your skin is really important if you want to remain dry, comfortable and easily mobile. I don't know about you guys, but a lot of my bass fishing for example involves a fair amount of walking and/or climbing and scrabbling around, and even when the weather is really cold this can build up a lot of heat underneath one's waders. For years and years I was wearing some very old cotton-based thermal tights (ok, don't think of me in them, it's not a nice thought) that would end up literally soaking wet if we went yomping. But more recently I have become a lot more interested in looking into, wearing and testing different, more "technical" clothing that I reckon will benefit my fishing, and I can't believe how awesome these lightweight thermals are that I have been using for a while now.
- We have a very good Cotswold store here in Plymouth, and from my initial research I found that Helly Hansen are doing a whole load of different "base layers" (also thanks to my mate Andy, he was raving about the stuff), and I ended up getting their HH Warm Pant (see here) and their Ice Crew top (see here). Have a look around and you can always get a good deal on combinations like these. Now I do accept that a lightweight, warm base-layer is hardly as exciting or glamorous as a new fishing rod, reel or even shiny lure, but personally I am always on the lookout for anything that works better for me. I don't know exactly what it is about these Helly Hansen base layers I have been using, but they are just awesome to wear and move around in when I have got my waders on. No more soaking wet cotton thermals, no more damp jeans. They just seem to work really well - easy to overlook this kind of thing, but to me it's really important, and they are without a doubt the best lightweight thermals I have ever worn. Great for wearing at the moment as well as the weather hovers between winter and spring.
- If we take this Helly Hansen thermal base layer as a really good starting point for a lot of conditions, I was also wearing the Hardy EWS Fleece Joggers on top of them when it was brutally cold at times this winter. Wear this lot underneath breathable waders and I can't see how you can get cold - unless you fall in that is. Still easy to move around in, and very comfortable and "efficient". I don't think I would have got through my Mongolia trip last September without those EWS Joggers to sleep in every night in my tent !! Modern technical clothing is the way forward for me when it comes to my work and fishing.
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- I thought you might like to see this new lure that I picked up the other day (not that I have a problem or anything like that) - you might remember me talking about a very similar looking one on this blog very recently (see here). Well, there's me rather smugly thinking along the secret squirrel lines of having stumbled upon a potentially lethal bass lure that my mates had never even heard of, and then at the Hooked Live show the other day in Dublin I walked onto the Henry's Tackle Shop stand and saw this thing above !! It looked similar to the one I had rather sneakily acquired, but the damned thing was actually a bit different. Slimmer, more aero-dynamic, and definitely a bit more "subtle" than the one I had already got. So I had to get one..........
- I had no idea that anybody in Europe was actually doing any of these F-Tec lures, but a bunch of them look awesome for our bass fishing (F-Tec website is here). So I am really pleased that the guys at Henry's Tackle Shop have them in (see here for the one I got) - the lure you can see above that I picked up at the Dublin show is called the F-Tec S-four Mark II 128 (128mm, 18g) and although I have only played around with it for a little bit, that cut-face promotes a massive side to side, head shaking kind of action, plus it swims really, really shallow. Nice and noisy as well, my hunch is that it casts better than the other one I was talking about the other day. A bit like a Tackle House Feed Shallow on steroids. Out the window goes my chance of a secret squirrel success with these ones then...........onwards and upwards though !!
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Posted 05:51, 15 March 2010
- I sneaked off from work for a few hours late Friday afternoon, and although my feeling was that the water was going to be far too clear and settled (a week of NE winds, fairly obvious), I guess there is always a chance. OK, mid-March, low water temperature (but a warmer air temp), crystal clear, smallish tide, hardly ideal, but it's better to be out than be banging your head against the wall thinking about it. To be perfectly honest though, I had a feeling that the light was going to get really, really good as the sun went down, and I needed some specific photos for some features I am in the middle of writing........
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- I did fish for a while, but in reality I had photography on the brain as the light began to get good - much as a shot of a spinning reel is often just what it is, I love it when the light gets low and soft and you can use the angles of the rocks to cut the shadows and the actual light across something as inanimate as a reel (ok, so it's my beloved Stella 4000FD, but it's still just a reel) and make something far more creative out of it. I don't know if anybody saw me crouched down on the rocks concentrating intently on bits of gear, but if they had I am sure they would have wondered what on earth I was up to. It's easy to get lost in what you are doing when the quality of the light just gets better and better. Although I am a fishing junkie, I guess that photography gives me as much of a kick - a different kind of kick, but it gets me going in a big way.
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- OK, so the photo above is not much more than "lure sitting on rod handle", but it's the quality and the softness of the light that makes the already classic MegaBass Zonk 120 Gataride look as awesome as it does. Notice that there are no blown highlights off the flank of the lure, a problem that often arises when there is any kind of direct sunlight on a subject matter like this. I tend to travel quite "camera and lens light" when I am out fishing/photographing, much lighter than I would when out photographing only, and I don't have space for diffusers and things like that. Underexpose a bit to help retain the dark background and let the subject matter (the Gataride) stand out, get your own shadow out of the way, use that stunning light, compose, and snap away - and you thought it was just a photo of a killer lure !! OK, so it is.....
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- Tom asked what braid it was on my reel in the comments section of my last post (lure colours) - I picked this stuff up in a really good tackle shop in St. Malo before we got the ferry back to Jersey after the Nantes bass show. Some of the guys switched me on to it at the actual show itself, but I was managing to resist. Until I got in that shop !! If you have used true 8-strand braid for your lure fishing then you will know all about how good this kind of modern mainline is. Very different to your more "regular" 4-strand braid, but it tends to cost. For a long time now I have been using (and seriously loving) the grey 20lb Varivas Avani Sea Bass Max Power PE (see here) and I simply can't fault it.
- But this multi-coloured braid on my Stella at the moment is the brand new Daiwa Tournament 8 Braid in 20lb breaking strain, and my initial impressions are that it is simply awesome (almost freaky thin, seriously, you can't believe this can be 20lb). I do like coloured lines, indeed I always have for various reasons, but it also comes in a straight green if that kind of thing freaks you out. I bought a 150 metre spool of this new 8-strand braid at that St. Malo shop for around 25 Euros I think it was, and that is seriously good value for money for a product like this. In the Daiwa France catalogue there are a big number of breaking strains and spool sizes available. I am not sure if anywhere in the UK is doing this braid yet, but I would hope that in due course that a modern 8-strand braid like this becomes available in shops and online in the UK. We shall see......
- Thanks for such a good response via the comments to my last blog post about lure colours - I am not even remotely close to knowing that much about the success of different colours in different places and situations, but I am of the feeling (and in agreement with many of the comments) that the lure type and actual action are perhaps the most important things to consider (but note the word "perhaps"). Colour has to be of real importance, but I can't help but feel slightly that colour means more to us than it does to the fish. Or is that completely wrong ? Fishing is what it is, and we will simply never know all the answers - and I find that hugely reassuring in this day and age.
