There is a rumour that all the brightly coloured floats and bling are actually designed to catch the fishermen rather than the fish

Its pretty hard to run any sort of scientific analysis on whether or not the fish prefer it, especially here in HB.
You would need a constant supply of ready fish, which we don't have.
What we do often have is a massive supply of paddle crabs, and metre long floating traces tend to slow them down a bit. They will still eventually grab your bait, but you might get 20min of fishing time before they do, instead of 30 seconds