The Truth about Braid VS. Mono Line Stretch

There’s a whole lot of “information” out there on the internet about the difference between line stretch when it comes to braid vs. mono. Line manufacturers put out some info on this topic, too, but whenever a manufacturer is concerned you have to take what they say about their own product with a grain of salt. So, how can you figure out just how much difference there is in line stretch? There’s only one way – try it for yourself.

To perform our test we used different size lines, 15- and 30-pound test, in both braid and monofilament. We stretched a surveyor’s tape measure out on the ground, then held the reel over the zero mark while centering the end of the line first on the 50 foot mark, and then on the 100 foot mark. At each distance, my helper pulled the line until the reel began releasing drag (set at 1/3 of the line’s breaking strength, just like in the real world) and measured how much it stretched. After doing so and tabulating the results, we also tried holding the lines taunt at each distance mark, looping the ends to a scale, and performing a hook-set. Since a big alleged advantage of braid is the no-stretch hook-set, we wanted to see just how much pressure gets lost when using a stretchy line versus one with less stretch.

The results were interesting, to say the least. The 15-pound test mono stretched about three times as much as the braid at both distances (12 inches versus four at 50 feet, and 10 inches versus 31 at 100 feet), but we note that “no stretch” braid did in fact stretch a bit. Hook-setting power dropped from seven pounds (at both distances) for braid to five pounds for mono at 50 feet and four pounds at 100.

Since we could apply a lot more pressure to the heavy line before the drag kicked in, it stretched a lot more. For braid it was eight and 12 inches and for mono, 41 and 105 inches. But even more interesting, all that stretch led to a dramatic drop in hook-setting power. Braid held steady at 14 pounds, while mono dropped to five and then 3.5 pounds. Ouch.

The moral of the story? Yes, mono does stretch a heck of a lot more than braid, but the difference becomes much more significant as line size – and thus drag setting – increases. it was also quite interesting to learn that mono won’t stretch anywhere near 25-percent in the real world, because your drag kicks in long before that happens. Just for yucks we did crank the drag down to see how much stretch we could get out of 15 pound test before it snapped, and at 50 feet, it stretched to 58.2 – or about 16-percent – before snapping.

Food for thought…