Bass Fishing photo
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So here’s a question I was wondering about last night. For those of you using superlines (e.g., braids or FireLine), how are you splicing those lines to a nylon mono or fluorocarbon leader?

Myself, I do a bunch of different things. For surfcasting and when using either spinning tackle (with Fireline) or conventional gear (with Berkley Big Game Braid), I palomar-knot the braid to a small barrel swivel, then clinch-knot a short, heavy fluoro leader to the other end of the swivel. The swivel, or course, stays outside of the tip guide when casting. When freshwater bass fishing using similar lines, I most often use back-to-back uni-knots in splicing on a leader, which creates a knot that can pass through the guides when I cast. That connection has only about 70 percent of unknotted line strength, but the pound-tests I’m using are high enough so I don’t think that makes much difference.

I’ve recently highlighted the J Knot as a monofilament splice, but it was originally developed by Berkley’s Dave Justice as a superline-to-mono splice. Justice has told me it works extremely well in that application–much better than when I’ve used it just to splice two pieces of mono–and it’s something I want to spend more time with this coming season.

But how about you…any bright ideas for this common problem?