I agree with this 100%! However, I became so frustrated losing fish on super lines after the hook up that I switched over to mono...  I now use 50lb mono for all my shallow water trolling after years of using super lines. 

I must admit that it was less "maintenance" with the super line, cool to feel every head shake, and snapping off weeds was definitely easier, but in my mind there's no question that I now lose less fish with the mono. A bonus is that mono works much better for boards, and is a lot cheaper as already stated.

To combat the hook up problem with mono on boards, (and it can be a problem) when a rod goes off I throttle the motor and turn the boat away from the fish… even at 4 miles an hour.  Although it's hard to get other people to remember it in the heat of the moment when they are running the boat, I can pretty much guarantee you this will increase the percentage in the net.  A bonus here is that the boards on the opposite side slack up so you can clear them a little quicker too.

Hope this doesn't just confuse you more?

Hey Rich, just noticed you posted... how's it going. I know wire has been a big winner for you over the years, but have you actually witnessed times where it is the only thing going? I gave up on it about 10 years ago because it was a little fragile and a pain to work with, but would rethink it based on your recommendations.

We should fish this spring. [email protected]

Like anything, it comes with experience and there are always a ton of variables.  What works good for one person may not work good for another, budgets, the size of the target fish etc.  For instance, I developed the gas and turn strategy on a strike when I started trolling top water baits about 15 years ago, when you're traveling at under 2 miles an hour with 5/0 hooks or larger it's a necessity.

As a general rule you could run slightly tighter for mono initially because of the stretch, then back it off, but in my opinion it's more dependent upon the size of the bait/hooks, obviously the larger the lure/hook the tighter you're going to have to run the drag with either line.  If you set the hook with the boat you can run a pretty light drag.  To give you an idea, it's nothing for a good fish to make an initial run of 150’ with my current setup.

I personally do not like fiberglass rods, although I can understand the reasoning. I don't like them because they load up and it takes longer for me to “safely” bring the bait in, we've all had a bait come flying back at us and this just happened one too many times to me with a fiberglass rod .  I run cheaper graphite 8' rods with good backbone and softer tip, my outside board rods are a little longer 8.5 and a little stiffer. You should be able to get some nice trolling graphite rods in the $80-$120 range but to start with maybe go cheap to figure out what you like.

I used to use the large birds with the super lines for years, there's a pretty cool way to wrap the super line around the red pin releases so they don't slip. However, a good friend of mine (RM) convinced me to start using the offshore with the RO-18 clip a few years ago, he was right… definitely the gold standard, especially with monofilament. Kind of a neat trick I developed with the Offshores is to tie a piece of super line at an angle from the board to the RO-18 clip, it keeps them from loading up with weeds and spinning, it's a whole lot easier to bring them in when they are loaded up. I don't even use my mast system anymore because of the floaters where I typically fish, but again I can certainly see using a mast system at times too... but that's another conversation.