The Latest Lines Will Put More Bass in Your Boat This Year

Abrasion-Resistance

Most anglers understand that abrasion-resistance indicates a line’s ability to withstand cutting or tearing by sharp objects. Lines and leaders must stand up to rocks, barnacles, teeth, zebra mussels, dock posts, and sometimes poor-quality or damaged rod guides. While most lines of all sorts boast excellent abrasion-resistance, experience shows it just ain’t so.

Defining and comparing abrasion-resistances has been a challenge, however. Depending on conditions you fish, some lines last and others quickly appear cracked or rough and must be retied regularly. If you’re casting worms or crankbaits into beds of vegetation like cabbage and coontail, and your line needs retying every hour or two, it’s not abrasion-resistant.

On the other hand, no one can fault a line for breaking, when a fish turns around a rusty dock pole or a bull smallmouth dives behind a zebe-encrusted boulder. The problem is, there’s no industry standard for what constitutes abrasion-resistance, as there is for tensile strength and knot strength. In the past, companies and researchers have constructed an array of line torture devices, consisting of sandpaper or wood or gritty cylinders to pull lines across until they break. Count the number of passes before breakage, and you have a comparative measure.

In 2007, TackleTour, an online reference for fishing tackle (tackletour.com), conducted a series of tests on popular fluorocarbon line brands intended as castable lines, not leaders. Knowing that abrasion-resistance is positively related to line diameter, they tested fluoros measuring from 0.30 to 0.32 mm in diameter, about the same as 12-pound Berkley Trilene XL. Interestingly, various lines of this diameter were rated 10-, 12-, and 14-pound test.

Results of this test showed great variation, with some fluoros nearly 40 percent less abrasion-resistant than XL and some considerably more so. The toughest was Toray Super Hard, a Japanese brand designed as a hard fluorocarbon, as opposed to limper formulations meant for easier casting or line management. In general, lines with better handling characteristics didn’t fare as well as stiffer, harder lines in the abrasion test. An exception was P-Line’s Halo, the first and apparently the only co-fluoride (a mixture of two different fluorocarbons) on the market, which handled well and showed good abrasion-resistance. (Note that the latest Trilene and Stren fluorocarbons were not included in these tests.)

Stretching the Truth?

Another perceived advantage of fluorocarbon lines is low stretch. This characteristic could help set hooks at a distance and perhaps also telegraph bites more easily. In either case, the actual amount of pull on the line is unknown, but certainly slight.

TackleTour tested the same 14 fluorocarbon lines for stretch, again comparing them to Trilene XL. They hung 3-pound weights on the lines and checked them over three hours, and found that all the fluoros did stretch, some even more than 12-pound XL.

In fishing situations, staff members also have found that fluorocarbon lines do indeed stretch under a strong pull, and that afterward, their strength may be substantially diminished. We know that some materials can be placed under a load and then released, returning to their former length and condition once the pull is released. Monofilament lines are a good example of this tendency.

Further tests by TackleTour verified that fluorocarbons generally do not share this ability. All fluoros except Sunline Shooter remained in lengthened condition, with resulting loss of strength. Interestingly, a few fluoros stretched more when soaked in water than when dry, indicating they’re not water-resistant under strain.