How to twist single-strand wire
A single-strand wire wrapped properly will rarely let you down in the heat of the momentIf you want to catch a mackerel, you need to know how to work with single-strand wire.
Before the advent of heavy nylon and matching crimping systems, single- and multi-strand wire was widely used for marlin fishing, plus anything with teeth from sharks to Spaniards.
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For decades galvanised .040 single-strand wire was the leader material of choice in the Great Barrier Reef giant black marlin fishery; the calloused hands of a Cairns deckie could turn out immaculate barrel rolls and haywire twists in the stuff while swigging on a XXXX. Well, not quite, but each was a work of art with not a wrap out of place.
Fresh .040 was murderously stiff to work with, though, but cut to length and left hanging on the back of the game chair footrest for a couple of days, the salt air made it a lot more amenable.
The good feature of single-strand was that if your hands got wrapped up in the wire it was possible to kink and break it before joining the underwater wiremen’s club.
This is also its Achilles heel, as a kinked wire loses much of its breaking strain leading to lost fish. If the wire develops a kink, especially after a fish is caught, cut the terminals off and bin the rest.
Overall, it’s pretty cheap and when you get good at it, it doesn’t take long to make up plenty of spares.
The key to good wirework is that the haywire twists need to be tight, and the barrel rolls at right angles to the standing part of the wire.
While the Cairns guys often did it bare-handed, for us soft suburbanites using pliers to hold the wire while making the twists is perfectly acceptable.
Generally speaking, 10-20 haywire twists should suffice, with five barrel rolls to finish it off.
Never cut the tag end with pliers, as it leaves a skin shredding burr behind; instead, create a crank handle at 90 degrees to the barrel roll and snap it off flush.
Like so many things with fishing, practice makes perfect, but if you still can’t get it right, DuBro make some brilliant wire twist tools.
Just for illustrative purposes, we’ve gone with quite heavy wire here, way more than you would ever need for mackerel.
For Spanish and spotties you’ll want a selection from .012 (32lb) up to .022 (105lb) given the size of the fish and their fluctuating mood on any given day.
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