My introduction to Blackwater International’s hollow braid topshotting technique came from fishing with Alan Fong almost a year ago when he debuted his Al-E-Baby swimbait. Alan had been shown this rigging method by Dean Yoshizumi from Blackwater International and was totally enamored with it.

I’m a natural skeptic to such things so while I was intrigued, I had to see how it was done myself before coming to any conclusions.

As fate would have it, shortly after that trip with Alan, my good friend, Jonah Li of Hi’s Tackle Box gave me a call and said there was someone he wanted me to meet. It was none other than Dean Yoshizumi.

Well, to make a long story short, Dean showed me the connection one day in Jonah’s store explaining to me it is a method he borrowed from his days of fishing long range tuna. I mean, if he can land two hundred plus tuna on such a setup, surely this rigging will hold up fishing for bass. I walked out with an armload full of product including the clamp stand so I could try this rigging method myself back home.

Unfortunately, my early attempts were not met with much success as I didn’t quite have all the pieces to the puzzle or the necessary patience to complete the rigging.

Fast forward to just last week out on El Novillo Lake in Mexico where Dean was on hand to provide top shots for everyone and I lept at the opportunity to try this once more. I had him fix up my Quantum Tour PT reel, a member of our 2009 high speed reel shootout, and off I went the next day to fish this setup on my Phenix Ultra MBX 707H rod.

Why even bother you ask? Well, if you’re one that prefers to use smaller than normal reels like me, yet, are fishing techniques that require higher strength line, AND don’t like the potential visibility issues braid presents, this is an almost perfect solution. You get the high capacity advantages of braid with the low visibility and abrasion resistance properties of fluoro.

Throw in the added benefit of no knots ticking through your guides on the cast and it is almost a no brainer!
But until you actually fish it and put this stuff through everyday applications, the trust in the connection and the benefits of going through all this trouble in the first place are rather obscure.

I’m here to share my epiphany of fishing this wicked setup:

1) Not only do you get the benefits from all of the above, but the white hollow braid makes an excellent strike indicator when floating on top of the water. You can literally see your line straighten out when fishing any slack line presentation. All that’s left for you to do is wind up the slack and set hook!

2) The abrasion resistance of the Toray Fluoro at 20lb test (we used the Bawo SuperHard Premium Plus at Novillo) is astounding. I cannot tell you how many times I cast my injection molded Lunker Punker Jr. through some of those dragon bushes and rather than move the boat in to retrieve the bait, I wound the bait up close to the bush and catapulted it back to the boat. Each time I expected my fluoro leader to be all messed up, but each time it came back as clean and unabraided as can be. I still can’t believe it.

3) Reconnecting a new leader is a snap. Dean pre-tied several fluoro to hollow braid leaders and once you have that hollow braid mainline on your reel, just use the simple, no knot hollow braid to hollow braid connection method to attach your new leader and voila, you are done. It is impossibly quick and easy.

http://tackletog.com/news/2009/03/19/hollow-braid-splice-connection/

4) You truly receive 100% line strength with this method because there are no knots to fail you. On several occasions, I snagged up on the bottom or in one of those submerged dragon bushes and could not get my bait out. No matter how hard I pulled with my thumb on the spool of the reel, I couldn’t break off. So, instead, I tied my hollow braid off at the boat cleat, well above where any of the fluorocarbon leader material was in the line and each time, I either straightened out the hooks or pulled up a section of brush.

While at Novillo, I ended up fishing this on all four of the high speed reel contestants and I used them all on techniques ranging from cranks to top water to jigs to soft plastics to big baits and I haven’t looked back since. It is now time to re-explore learning how to rig this myself because it has quickly become my favorite method of putting line on my reel.