When tooling around on the Charkbait site I noticed an option when buying a reel to have the spectra on top and mono backing for bottom fishing. Could someone explain to me why this is good for bottom fishing? I live on the east coast and do alot of bottom fishing with mono and I am considering trying spectra. Thanks so much.

Up here in Alaska, we always fish straight spectra for bottom fishing. It has almost zero stretch so you feel the bottom better. It is thinner than mono so it doesn't catch in the current and you can get by with less lead. I sometimes use a 3 or 4 foot leader but when fishing 200 feet, I don't think the fish can see the line at all. Commercial halibut fishermen use very heavy cord leaders and it works for them.

Other low stretch benefits, better hook set and gets the fish up off the bottom.

Good morning fellas, the benefit of reverse spooling (mono on the bottom) is less $$$ spent on braid to fill the reel. If your reel has 400 to 600yrd line capacity of 50# braid you can fill the bottom 1/3 ot 1/2 of the reel with 30 or 40# mono and then just add a few hundred yrds of braid on top rather filling the reel with all 400 to 600yrds of braid. Saves guys half the cost of spooling. You never want to get into the mono when fishing though.

tight lines,
Behdad

Personaly I like a full spool of braid and just use smaller reels with less capaity.

A bigger size diameter spool will revolve and take up, or let out, alot of line per revolution and still be easy to turn the handle. That's why a big sized reel spool is good for bottom fishing, but as said earlier, very expensive to fill completely with all spectra, and unlees you are fishing for the great unkown you won't need 10,000 yards line capacity. A small reel will do but you will work harder in winding if fishing really deep. You will wind alot more and get tired of that.

I go for NN version reels , They hold 300 yds of fairly heavy spectra ,so are reasonable to fill ,in terms of cost.Also there are no joints of different lines ,which can be a weak link. Yet they offer the strenght of the internals of their wider cousins. If you need to winch from deep, the low diameter left on the spool is easier to get line on and the ever increasing spool line diameter as you recover line helps speed the deal up at the end .

This is something that I recently went through
myself. I was not a big fan of bottom fishing the local islands or near waters. Having to crank my reel 180 times to check my bait when
fishing in 250 ft of water is not my idea of a good time. Do that 30-40 time in a days fishing and you are ready for a wrist transplant.
I solved my aversion to bottom fishing by purchasing a Daiwa LW40HS, filling it half way
with 30lb mono and the top half with 250 yds
of 30 lb spectra. The reel takes in 48 inches
per crank and by using the 30lb spectra the diameter of the spool hardly reduces with 250 ft of line out so your line per crank stays at a high level. It now takes me about 70 cranks to get up from 40 fathoms. I can live with that.
Spectra has only 4% stretch vs. mono's 25-30% stretch so you have almost direct contact with your bait and feeling the bite is MUCH more sensitive. The greatly improved sensitivity alone is worth switching to spectra. Also the smaller diameter enables you to use less weight to stay on the bottom. I highly recommend it. But be for warned that if you use a leader that join between the spectra and the mono/fluoro is the toughest in fishing to tie correctly. There are many bad knots and just a few good ones. Check out the Charkster’s geat video for a spectra to mono/fluoro connection on this site.
What ever you do and no matter what any one says do not use the Uni to Uni it has the habit of resurrecting your expletive deleted vocabulary.