Q: I have been reading some crazy stuff about knots and crimps lately. How can a line with a knot in it be stronger than the same line with no knot? And what do you recommend to connect braid to mono?

Leigh J. Pope
Parish, Florida

A: I got a laugh out of that too. Obviously, it can't. The best a knot can do is not weaken the line. The discrepancy lies in testing small sizes of Spectra braided line. It's very hard to test braided lines with most line-testing machines, and the line itself is very inconsistent in its breaking strength, from even a short sample.

The easiest way to connect braid (or Dacron) to mono is to tie a Bimini twist double line in each piece of line and then connect them with a two-times-through loop-to-loop connection. If you tie the knots right, you'll end up with a connection that's stronger than the single piece of mono, and that is all you really need. Do not pull the haywire-style twists down too tightly when tying the Bimini-in-Spectra braid. It does something to disrupt or separate the fibers, which Tommy Green, a tackle-shop owner and recognized knot freak and expert, calls "burning it." With mono, it's not as critical how tightly you make the twists.

No matter what type of line you use to make your Biminis, finishing the knot with a tight series of floss half hitches on top of each end can turn a bad knot into a good one. When chasing world records on light line, I add a small sleeve of Dacron over the Spectra to avoid having the thin Spectra line cut the thicker Dacron or monofilament nylon.

A Bimini knot and an Aussie braid are the only two 100 percent knots in fishing line. Chinese-finger-trap splices test out well if done right but can be hard to accomplish on light line and are downright impossible in flat braid.