While perusing the Seaguar booth at ICAST a few weeks back, Long Island editor Matt Broderick and I came across something that really grabbed our attention. A standalone display of spools of braid, laid out according to strength, the first thing we noticed was the unique ‘pound-test’ increments, then we realized how thin it was!
Seaguar PEX8 is a JDM product; JDM stands or ‘Japanese Domestic Market’ and what that basically means is that it’s a product, designed in the highly-competitive Japanese fishing market for their highly-competitive fishermen. The Japanese market drives a huge segment of the American market, and a lot of the angling innovations we take for granted today were originally brought over as JDM products. These products are often thought of as new things for tackle junkies to obsess over, but many of these items become standard issue, and we think Seaguar PEX8 might fall into that category.
This braided line is extremely thin, up to 22% thinner than the braided lines most of us are currently using. This is important on – at least – three fronts: thinner lines cast farther, you can pack more line onto your spool and a thinner line cuts through current more easily, making it easier to fish finesse presentations in deeper, moving water. Matt was immediately excited to try the PEX8 for snap-jigging and I had visions of fishing big soft plastics in deep moving waters from my kayak. But these lines, with their diminutive diameters, will find many uses from targeting holdover stripers in deep rivers, to presenting tiny jigs to backwater fluke, to slow-pitch jigging for sea bass, to precision drop-shotting in freshwater… this line will change the game.
PEX8 is ultra-sensitive and super-smooth, thanks to its eight-carrier construction, featuring no stretch and comes in a hi-vis passion pink – that’s metered with a contrasting lime green color (a blotch every meter) that allows anglers to see their line more clearly, visually detect light bites and to monitor their depth. It’s offered in 200-meter spools (219 yards) and comes in six unique pound-test ratings; 12, 16, 18, 21, 24, and 33-pound test. Seaguar PEX8 is an exceptional casting line and Seaguar pros suggest that when you fish this line, you need to think a little differently about pound test and diameters because this line is so thin, in applications where you’d usually fish 10-pound test, you may be able to bump up to 16 because of its superior thinness. Allowing anglers to target bigger fish in tougher structure with greater confidence!
If you like finesse fishing in heavy current, if you’re looking for a braided line that will help you reach out and catch those distant schools of albies, if you’re snap-jigging junkie, check out Seaguar’s PEX8 ultra-thin, long-casting and super sensitive JDM braid, it just might change your game.
