King Mackerel: Single Wire or Multi-Strand ?

Water temperatures have reached 68 degrees and bait is busting along the beaches. King Mackerel season is in full swing! Basic King Mackerel rigs involve leader wire, treble hooks, chin weights, and single nose hooks. Fishermen turn to a single strand of wire as their tooth proof leader material against bite offs from King Macks. Many, however, choose multi stranded wire instead. What's the difference?

Single strand wire is just one bare single length of wire. How many times have you caught a King Mack on single wire and have it so kinked you had to throw the rig out? Multi-strand wire, like AFW SurfStrand 1x7 for example, is a wrapped group of smaller stainless steel wires. It offers kink resistance and trustworthy strength. The issue with multi-strand though is with the smaller wires wrapped together; after a few chafes, chews, and teeth marks it may lose its reliability and break with the next fish. You don't want to lose a big money fish because the strands failed. Although you'll find that you might be able to re-use multi-strand rigs more times versus single strand Mackerel rigs, it comes with that questionable cost.

Multi-strand wire is easy and simple to rig as well. You use figure eight knots. Anyone with practice can rig multi-strand King rigs in a few seconds. Single strand wire, as you already know, takes haywire twists. Haywire twists have to be done correctly to be effective and tying those rigs can take 60 seconds to 2 minutes.

As you can see, neither multi-strand or single-strand comes with an error-free guarantee. Both can be bitten through by toothy fish and both have their visibility drawbacks. If you are tournament fishing, I would stick with the lightest single strand you are comfortable with because you want to fool the biggest single King Mackerel out there. If you're fun fishing or commercial Mackerel fishing then go with the multi-stranded wire.