Good start Trialsguy. I went through the same learning curve. With just a rope you have to move really slow. The addition of the ties allowed me to drag faster and the floats made it better yet. Without floats my rope did eventually sink too much to work on its own. I bought a pack of 500 ties and used almost all of them on a 100 foot rope. So about 5 ties per foot. Don't make the mistake I made in my first attempt and just wrap the ties around the rope. My rope is poly which is slippery and so the ties just spin on the rope and don't do a good job catching onto stuff. I had to stick the ties through the center of the braided rope so they wouldn't spin. Then you need to twist the rope around to a different orientation for each tie so that they don't all end up on the same side of the rope. You want them to stick out all around the rope so no matter how the rope twists as you are using it you still have ties that stick down into the water. I hate to say it since it took me several hours to add the ties but I think even more ties would work many times better because even with 500 ties if I pull too fast I lose stuff. I think 1000 ties would be great. I'm going to add more next year. Also I think stiffer ties would be better. I used 4 inch ties and they will eventually bend under too much load and start losing stuff. The next ones I add will be 6 inch ties which are stiffer. Or if I can find heavier weight 4 inch ties I'll get those. I put the floats about every 3 to 4 feet and that seems sufficient. I use smelt net to scoop stuff out of the pond after the rope herds it into shore. This works well on DW, FA, or leaves. It's about 20 inches diameter and 20 inches deep which is large enough to haul out 10 pounds of crap in a scoop.


Gotta get back to fishin!