Braid stands up well to crusty mangrove shoots and other structure on bonefish flats.

Poling the flats north of Big Pine Key, Dave Wylie sees a puff of mud 10 feet away. He stops his skiff and scans for the gray-green bodies camouflaged against the turtlegrass.

“There! Three fish!”

He flips out a shrimp. His rodtip shakes, and a spray of water from the racing line jets into the distance. Bonefish on.

After landing the fish, Capt. Wylie says, “We never would have felt the tap-tap of that fish picking up the shrimp on mono line. With braided, you feel everything, even the shrimp twitching 60 feet away.”

Down in Key West, a permit raises its head above water and eyes Capt. Phil Thompson staked out across the channel. Thompson grabs the spinning reel with the braided line, a hooked crab and a cork float and casts a good 80 feet to the fish, which takes the bait and runs with it for Brad Giroux, owner of Alaska’s Sprucewood Lodge, who’s never before seen, much less fought a permit.

In Biscayne Bay, Capt. Jorge Valverde and angler Jim O’Brien hook a big bonefish. On its first run, the fish peels off 270 yards of the braided line, far more than the 200 yards of mono that could have fit on that spool. As the bonefish races, the line cuts off little sponges that would have severed mono line at the touch. After a good fight, O’Brien lands the fish, which weighs 13-plus pounds.

These catches show why, on Florida’s southernmost flats, more bonefish and permit anglers are spooling up the newer braided lines. For their lack of stretch, which translates into better hooksets and sensitivity to action, their narrower diameter for equivalent strength, which provides greater casting distance, and for their abrasion resistance, which means fewer cutoffs and more fish landed, narrow-diameter braided lines are winning more converts every season.

Manufacturers, who market the lines under a number of names, initially introduced the smaller diameter braided lines about 10 years ago and continued to improve them with each passing year. About three years ago, they rounded the lines’ cores and applied new coatings to the lines’ tough, spun-polyester fiber material to make the lines more manageable to hold, knot and cast, and less abrasive and cutting to equipment like rod guides, fingers and hands. After those improvements, flats anglers started in earnest to test their advantages, and disadvantages, compared to nylon monofilament.

“In the last couple years I’ve gone to braided lines because I was frustrated losing fish on my spinning rods,” says Wylie, out of Ramrod Key. “A lot of people, when they get excited with a big fish, will wind against the drag, which will twist and weaken mono line. When that happened with mono, I’d change the spool immediately with one of the extras I always bring. But if I didn’t notice it, and we’d get a bonefish on with that weakened line and it rubbed against a rock, a sponge, or a mangrove shoot, well, there goes that fish that we worked so hard to get. Braided line can withstand that spinning and it doesn’t twist or weaken. I foresaw that the braided lines might be the answer to getting more fish to the boat.”

Durable line provides reassurance when landing tough critters such as permit.

Wylie first bought one spool of braided line and tried it for bonefish with good results. Then he put it on his permit rods, and finally on his heaviest rods for tarpon. Its resistance to abrasion—even up against barnacle-encrusted bridge pilings when tarpon fishing—and its increase in casting distances, have both proved extremely valuable.

“Now I can put 50-pound test on my spinning reel and it’s got the diameter of about 12-pound-test mono,” Wylie says. “If I use 30-pound test, that’s the diameter of about 6-pound monofilament. So you get a lot more distance casting.”

To be able to cast an extra 40 or 50 feet, in any direction, greatly increases chances for hookups for flats anglers whose slightest movement, much less the poling of a boat, can spook fish in the highly illumined shallow water. Add to that increased range the lighter presentations that braided lines afford, and old monofilament begins to fade away.

“When they came out with the improved 10-pound-test/2-pound mono equivalent lines a couple years ago, I switched to them right away,” says Valverde, who fishes Biscayne Bay, Flamingo and the Upper Keys.