A Little Dock Talk: Another One of My Notions Up in Smoke

Most local anglers who know me very well know that I use 100% braided line--specifically Stren Sonic Braid in the olive green color. I settled on this particular line after a lot of testing--and a very dear lesson I learned several years back while fishing Lake Gaston for a week with my friend, Jim Bauer. Suffice it to say that when you try fishing that lake with bright white braid, you might as well be hanging out a neon sign, telling the fish to "Go away!" That's exactly what they did--all week long.

I think most fishermen generally will agree that, in a sense, fishing has a lot to do with confidence, whether it's the boat we own, the rod and reel we use, the lures we fish, or the line we spool up with regularly. And, for a lot of years now, I've been fishing that olive green Sonic Braid, thinking that, given the color of the water in the North Landing River, the fish likely were not seeing my line--at least not very clearly.

That notion, however, has been squashed, thanks to the research of my friend, Charlie Bruggemann. I'm here to tell you that this man's brain never rests. He's always coming up with new experiments. The last time we had coffee together, he shared a couple ideas with me that he plans to try this year, and I hardly can wait to see how they turn out.

At the moment, though, he's working on some underwater photography of his lures running in the water. He sent me a short clip of what he got on video the other day that I'm going to share with everyone at the end of this blog entry. He's a little disappointed in the fact that his underwater pictures were a little blurry. However, as he noted in his email to me, he found it "interesting how well the braid he uses stands out. I would have thought it would be harder to see," he said, adding that he plans to try the same experiment with a fluorocarbon leader and see how it shows up. He's also going to try coloring a few feet of line ahead of the lure with a black marker.

One look at Charlie's video clip quickly will dispel any thoughts you may have had about your olive/moss green braid being invisible in the North Landing River--far from it. For the record, Charlie uses 15-lb. Power Pro in moss green on his medium rods and 30-lb. Power Pro in moss green on his heavier rods. Take a look and enjoy.

Incidentally, a little while after Charlie had sent me the above video, he emailed me again, saying he just had finished watching some Rapala crankbait demos, in which the line was really visible in all of them. He concluded that nothing is "invisible," no matter what the ads say.