Page 21 - Joseph B. Healy "The Pocket Guide to Fishing Knots"

Cortland’s Tropic Plus GT Tuna Saltwater Line is a big-game line available in 13-weight for
heavyweight fighters.

My friend and my former editorial mentor at Outdoor Life, Vin Sparano,
wrote in his book Complete Outdoor Encyclopedia (1998), “Fishing lines
are made of a wide variety of natural and synthetic materials and as a
result differ widely in their characteristics and the uses to which they can
be put. No two types of lines, for example, have the same degree of
elasticity, abrasion resistance, water absorption, weight, and diameter.”
For spinning and bait-casting, the lines today differ based on the type of

fishing, and include monofilament to fluorocarbon but also braided lines,
called super braids.
Let’s first look at the traditional modern fishing material used as line,
leader, and tippet—monofilament. One of the contemporaries of A. J.
McClane was the fishing legend Joe Brooks, who wrote in his 1950 book

Salt Water Fly Fishing, “Every time I tie on a leader I wonder what we did
in the days before nylon appeared.”
This material, a single strand of extruded nylon, can be tapered to form
a fly-fishing leader to transfer weight into the cast going ahead of the
angler and again on the backcast; a level or uniform diameter line is used
as fishing line spooled on a bait-casting or spinning reel. Monofilament is
strong, it’s stiff enough that it resists kinking, it casts well and is easy to

retrieve, and it holds knots well. It’s served anglers since around World
War II days when it was introduced and is the most common fishing line
today. It has competition, though.
In the mid-1990s, a new type of line took the fishing world by storm, a
braided line made of Dyneema or Spectra (high-modulus polyethylene
gel spun through a spinneret) that had impressive tensile strength, low or

almost no stretch (and therefore sensitive to fish bites or strikes),
abrasion resistance, held no memory when coiled, and came in strengths