...and on the 5th day he made it clear!!

You’ve all seen those NRL ads where nanas’ and poppies are tackling each other and old mate on stage pulls a ripper dummy pass on the bloke doing Shakespeare and winds up working his scull in the Baltic Pine floor boards! Well, picture me as the whole back line and the TNT deliver man as the bloke who as the ball! But he doesn’t have a ball……. No, he has a package…….. Yes! I want, he has!!
No need to bore you all with the finer details of the drycleaners bill for Mr TNT’s work shirt and pants but what you really should be asking me is “WHAT”S IN THE BOX???

Fireline, Fireline, Fireline! And it’s new and it’s clearish and it’s so thin and, and it’s……… well it’s…… perfect.
It’s been so long since we’ve had something as monumental as this to play with. You won’t really understand just how good this new line is until you’ve spooled up and that first cast is sailing off into the distance! Or when you start getting bites where before there were none! Or when you no longer need to tie a leader on!! Haharrrr!! That woke you up didn’t it. Yeah well slap me on the bum and call me sweetheart cause it all good, it’s real and it’s all true.

Fireline ‘Crystal’. It’s everything you’ve wanted in a polyethylene fiber line and more!
I’ll start with the most obvious of differences between the new Fireline Crystal and regular Fireline, the 3 new diameters. 1, 2 and 3-lb make an appearance (although you might need to squint to see them) and let me let me tell you, if you thought 4-lb was thin and cast a long way, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!! If we pull the microscope in for a closer look at the 1-lb version I’ve done a few breaking strain tests on it and the words ‘thin’ and ‘tough’ don’t even touch the edges!!
We have here 5 new Crystal Fireline’s (it comes in 1,2,3,4,6,8,10,14 and 20)and as you can see; the 1, 2, and 3-lb are as thin as a sand fly’s whisker! In my very unofficial breaking strain tests on the 1-lb Crystal Fireline broke at an average of an impressive 5.4-lb. Yeah you did read that right, 5.4-lb for the 1-lb (not surprising really when you look at the figures of 20-lb Fireline. It brakes at around 55-lb).

Raw PE is of a clear to opaque type color so we’ll say that it’s non-colored (dyed). The secret with this new fiber is in the thermal fusing department. Berkley has called it ‘MicroFused’ and that’s about as much info as we can get.
The sheer diameter of this line is outstanding! Coupled with this amazingly thin line is its ability to become virtually transparent underwater. Throw into the mix all the other statistics about Fireline and you got yourself one hell of a line!
For all of you that have climbed aboard the 2-lb ‘mono’ wagon well this is where you can get off! You’ve got here a line that is thinner than 2-lb mono and has all the fantastic non-stretch characteristics of Fireline and it goes translucent!!

Let’s have a close look at the diameter. The bar code you see here is the one from the front of a spool of Fireline. How’s that for thin!!



Now let’s look at its transparent qualities. Here we have between 20 and 30 strands of Crystal Fireline laying next to each other in weights 1-lb, 3-lb and 6-lb.



Now keep in mind that when it’s dry, this line will look whiter than when it’s wet! I don’t know too many people that catch fish on the side walk so I shot it wet as if it where submerged.

So what does all this new string mean to both the nuts& bolts guru and the weekend tangler?
One of the most hotly talked about prospects of this line will inevitably be ‘to leader or not to leader’! This will of course take some time to get a good handle on but from the limited fishing I’ve done with this line (all with out a leader) it seems to be the goods. Also from the fishes point of view it’s probably going to spook less of the unseen, over shot fish because of its color and as far as casting is concerned, it’s guaranteed to cast the same weights further and allow you to cast things you never had the ability to before!
And before you start up with the “you said we had to use colored line” any color that’s not black, gray or dark green can be seen from above the water so you can still see all you bites on the drop!



Just when you though it couldn't get any better!! Berkley’s US team has once again sharpened up the piscatorial pencil to rewrite the book of fishing line.
Personally, this new line will open doors to different fish and fishing styles that we haven’t even thought of yet and or couldn’t get to simply because of line diameter.

Bring on the thinness.

Adam ‘Mad Dog’ Royter