Whether you’re targeting our wily carp or massive catfish, the Big Game is the perfect mainline for Beausoleil.
Choosing your mainline for Beausoleil is quite an important decision. Unfortunately, we’ve found over the years that standard 15 or 20lb carp line is just not strong enough if you find yourself battling one of our large catfish. Even if you only want to target the carp, our moggies love boilies and one of the main attractions of our venue is that you never know what species you’ll be hooking next!
To make sure we give the best mainline advice to our visitors, we did extensive line testing 18 months ago with a dozen different brands. We found that the very affordable Berkley Big Game consistently outperformed lines that are more expensive and rated as being much stronger.
As a result, most anglers in 2017 spooled up with Berkley’s Big Game in 25lb for both the carp and the cats so we now have one year of real experience of the line at the venue.
The Big Game is an absolute winner
Catching carp with the Big Game was no problem at all, hundreds of carp were safely banked with zero breakages. Where the Big Game really made a difference was with the cats.
- In 2016, just 5 x 100lbs+ catfish were banked
- In 2017, a massive 13 x 100lbs+ were successfully landed
That’s a huge increase in success rate compared to all the years we have been running the venue and I have no doubt that it’s thanks to this line.
To my knowledge, there were no premature mainline failures as used to happen on 20lb carp lines in the past (on both carp and cats). Obviously even Big Game won’t stand up to being dragged round the island margin, aerator or bridge and a few were still lost when the angler lost control of these massively powerful creatures. Though I am sure it helped some anglers land cats from situations where other mainline would fail.
A great line to fish with
If you have never fished with a mono of 0.48mm diameter, don’t worry, it handles beautifully on modern big pit reels. Unlike many modern lines, it has no memory issues whatsoever, it sinks, it casts, it behaves very well and it’s a great line to fish with.
We found in our testing that the best knot to use with this line is the 4 turn blood knot. To protect the last metre of your mainline, I recommend Rig Marole’s Freefall tubing in 1mm bore. Other good choices are Korda Kamo Rig Tube or Dark Matter.
