zander1

Your question is a bit vague mate. What properties are you looking for? What is it you think the best coated braid offers?

Personally, the hook and hook link material dictate wether I need to use shrink tubing.

Good hooks- £1 toooo expensive for me tho I got them out of the bargain bucket of my local tackle shop...£1 a pack Result. Quality! another good reason to use big hooks

I agree Cobleyn. Problem is there are just so many variables; nothing can really be right or wrong everywhere 100% time. How often do you take what the mags say as gospel anyway??? I bet the mags do subliminally affect your fishing though

Good hooks- £1 toooo expensive for me tho

agreed

Get a feel for the lake bed by leading about or by using a marker mate. You could find more weed and silt than there is gravel- you never know If the water is gin clear and im fishing over gravel I tend to tie a fluro combi rig up with a beaked point hook, but tbh im using coated braids for pretty much all my fishing again now. One less knot in the setup is better than absolute invisibility in my eyes just as long as its all pinned down nicely. Of late ive been using suffix camfusion pretty much everywhere as im that confident with the stuff. people get put off by how dark it looks but don’t be, it blends in pretty much everywhere. Obviously its perfect in the silty areas but it doesn’t look half bad on clay or gravel. It often blends in better than my "gravel brown" hooklinks Have a look at the suffix camfusion, sheath skin or heavy skin mate. Very reliable and won’t break the bank Hope I could help mate

Other than recently using the chod, ive pretty much used the same 3 rigs for the last few years. Rigs very similar to what you see they guy in the mags and the guy in the next peg using. Obviously there are a few subtle changes but in general I use long curved shank hooks for my snow man presentations, curved (long and short shank) hooks for my pop-ups, and a wide gape type pattern for my standard bottom bait rig preferring to use a straight point rather than beaked point where I can I also tend to stick to size 6 in all patterns generally

Theres a few people that say you cant due to fish saftey.

If you use a semifixed back stop you can use pva sticks on your hooklink, feed the rig through the stick like normal. I just use a peice of rig tubing slid through the back bead. However, If you give it the big'un on the cast it will move your back stop.

No reason why it shouldn't work at all Lead in PVA bag full of crumb, pellets chopped and whole boilies with hook nicked into bag used to work a treat for me. I even used stringers attached to the hook with no problems. Like above, or you can fish pva sticks etc, some ways use semifixed back stops, otherways use a swivel lead fished helicopter style so you can tie pva things on directly under the lead.

That should be simple for you to work out lad, you aint a Noddy

This could be a very interesting Thread, will be good to see what, where, and why people use certain hooks over others in different situations. Im sure there are a lot of "which hook" threads mind, lets hope this is more in sightfull rather than just arguments over brand of hook Lead by example mrdevon

I dont bother doing this anymore, I had a spell on it, tbh I didnt notice a difference in my catch rate? I agree that on the "hand test" it does seem to flip faster, but my rigs still catch hold 99% of the time regardless? Any body else noticed similar results???

Bang on advice from Mr Matt again, that nugget of commonsense is often overlooked.