SportFishing and Charters Forum - Lead core for striper trolling/jigging

I have long used 40-pound marked monel for trolling/jigging parachute lures and jigs for stripers in 20 - 50 feet water. At around 3.5 nmh/4mph, 300 feet of monel will bring me down around 30' and I can get deeper with some additional weight.

With a fair number of kids and others for whom wire simply does not compute, I have had my fill of birds nests and want to try some lead core this season. I am thinking about 100 yards of leadcore over backing on 113H or 114H reels.

Can someone comment on what depth I am likely to achieve at 3.0 - 4.0 mph and recommended lead core weight. I am specifically wondering whether the "standard" 100 yard set-up is likely to get me deep enough (and adding more would not be a problem on the 114H).

Thanks for the advice.

You can spool the whole thing with it if you'd like. The only problem I had with the LC is that it holds salt like nothing else. I religiously rinse and soak my reels after each use. After two seasons with LC (I've read you should change it every year), I needed a replacement spool because of the corrosion. I gave up on it after that. Merely keep an experienced mate on board to let the lines out now....

Just started using lead core last fall. Have had success with it. We have been running two spoons. One with 300ft of wire and the other on lead core out a country mile. We put the lead core out so far to get it as deep as the 300ft of wire. When we first started the wire was outproducing but on recent trips the lead core has actually caught a few more fish than the wire. We did increase the the length of lead core we are putting out recently though. That had to help as the bait was on the bottom during most of the spring run here.

it willl take all 10 colors to get you down to 30 ft at 4mph.......
the same 10 will get you closer to 40 ft at 3mph.....
i troll at 2.8 in freshwater and 4 colors gets me about 24 ft or so......

id figure about 3ft or a tad less at ur speeds per color......

Thank you, all.

Jzima - I too do a thorough washdown, but thanks for the tip - will watch for corosion.

Nodoubt - sort of what I feared, but you've given me great real-life data here.

Best of season to all.

Why not use metered braid? Diawa boat braid

Extremely small diameter compared to Lead Core
Still colored at set intervals
Alot easier to tie and store on the reel
Can easily be bought up to 130# test.. LC the heaviest Ive ever seen was 60#.


Ive used it a once, the tackle shop guy tackled it up as the new best thing. One trip And I pulled it off and went back to braid. It took to much weight to do the same jib as regualr braid and had a ton of blowback. (took almost the whole 300ft to fish in 50ft of water with 28oz. With braid I was doing it with ALOT less line and only using 16oz.- Used the setups side by side, and the differance was substancail.)
Ive asked this question before, and have yet to get a answer that works.