The Spiderwire Stealth was all I could have hoped - you need to take care in spooling it onto the reel for the first time, making sure there's the right amount of tension, but once that's out of the way it casts and retrieves a dream, light and straight and supple, with no memory. It makes me eager to find some Invisi-Braid, because man, for ultralight, flouro sucks.
I've given up using it as leader material - I can't use it to tie a Palomar knot to my terminal tackle, as it's impossible to get it to loop tight enough to thread through the eye of a #14 swivel, or even an Owner #1/0 offset drop-shot hook. (I'm using these hooks to texas-rig my little stickbaits... they're smaller and more svelte than the Gama offset worm hooks in #1/0.)
It's not just 10lb-test that's the issue, either - I have 4lb-test Vanish, and it's even more of a bitch to tie, as you can't see the bugger without a magnifying glass while being as inflexible as the heavier stuff. I have ten thumbs and a serious caffeine habit - my fine motor skills are not up to the task of tying a Trilene knot in any conditions that don't involve a comfy chair and the Red Sox on the radio and a few hours to kill. Lakeside? Nuh-uh, no way.
Which is to say, the stuff is probably perfect for Carolina rigs, so I'll whip up a batch for this weekend. The Sox are playing Toronto as we speak, and I have this gorgeous old rocker my Granpa left me... I'll use the 4-lb test for the floating day-glo orange fake salmon eggs I bought on sale at Bennie's, and the 10lb test for the Berkely Gulp! 5" turtle worms.
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As an aside, for soft bait, I only use Gulp! brand baits. Plastic worms will be in the pond for centuries after they fall off your hook, and the fish that eat them, over and over, for decades to come, are in for a world of hurt. It's as bad as gut-hooking a fish with a lure. Done for, over and out. They won't be growing into the trophy-sized monster you dream of landing. Now, multiply your lost soft-plastic baits by several hundred, or for popular fishing spots, several thousand. Not good.
Gulp! baits are made of edible stuff, so if it falls off your hook, the fish gets a tasty, nutritious treat, or it simply rots away like an apple core. If you hate Berkely, Bio-Bait offers some very nice soft-bait if you don't mind mail-order. There are others, too, just google around.
This stuff fishes better than plastics, offering better wiggle and a more natural motion. This year, I bought a package of the Gulp! "Silver-shad" bait, and I'll be damned if the thing doesn't swim on the retrieve. What looks like flat grey in your hand turns silvery-flashy underwater.
By the same token, I don't use lead weights, especially for freshwater. RI water is bad enough as it is without me tossing in a toxic heavy metal like lead. Now, if I was the only man fishing in Rhode Island, who cares? But I'm one of several hundred thousand. Even if we only lose three or four sinkers a year, that's a hell of a lot of lead in the water-table our drinking water comes from, and in the meat of the keeper trout we feed our families. So, I only use lead-alternative weights: heavy-steel alloys or tungsten. They sell them at every Walmart, Dick's Sporting Goods and local bait shop in the country for a few cents more than regular lead weights. There's no excuse not to use them.
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The "Silver-shad" may be too silvery. The trout weren't biting at all, but that may be because it was too chilly this week for them to be overly active in pursuing larger baits and lures. I know there's trout in the pond, because the local cormorant came up with a whopper... it couldn't even swallow it, and it's mate came over and started to fight with it over the fish, who then escaped. Still, it's somewhat disheartening. A damn bird can catch a trout on this pond, why can't I?
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