have a question about wrasse fishing

fished a competition today and got 4 ballen wrasse, very big ones. my boat partner got 14 wrasse using the exact same rig and bait. he was catching a lot of smaller ones where as the 4 i caught were all quite large, around the 4/5 lb mark. i cudnt work out why i wasnt getting as many as he was and the only thing i could think of was the size of my weight. he uses braid on his reel and therefor uses a smaller ball weight where as i have nylon on mine and use a larger weight. i was wondering if my big weight was spooking the smaller wrasse.do u think this is possible. can anyone shine some light on this for me please.

Maybe he was able to react and strike to the bite more efficiently by having less weight.Also nylon isn't as sensitive as braid.
His baits might have been smaller ,or his hooks?

Yup. Wrasse can be tricky little sods like that, they'll have your bait sucked off the hook before you can react to them. Possibly your mate had better reactions than you.

sorry.i didnt make this very clear.i wasnt even getting bites.

There are loads of possibilities!
Were you fishing a charter boat or small boat?
You could've been fishing a different part of the reef.
Were your baits mangled? Maybe you missed a few fish due to the strrrrrrrrrretchy mono. Were you both using the same type rod?
Were you both dropping down or maybe he was scoring with a sneaky flick from the boat or vice versa?
Maybe with a smaller weight his bait was moving around better than yours.
Maybe he just kicked your ass

You may have been getting shy bites without even knowing it. Braid has no streach as the lads have pointed out. You will notice even the smallest of bites. The only other thing I can think off is bait size. Perhaps he was using less/smaller bait.

Next time bring a yellow lead and even the score

to answer your original question, wrasse are definately not spooked by lead size, there's
a video on here of several divers with camera crew and lights feeding wrasse out of
their fingers

i agree with the view above, for this job braid will outfish mono several times over

one other point, after bait has been in the water even a couple of mins the scent washes
out and the number of bites decreases significantly, so even if you caught nothing
wind it up and change, or change it drifting over a clean patch between reefs